AF-S Micro Nikkor 85mm 1:3.5G ED

I just purchased a 85mm 1:3.5G for the specific purpose of shooting pages in a book. The page size is 6x9. There are 427 pages. When I focus on a page I am not getting the entire page in the shot. I'm using autofocus. I want to OCR the page and use voice to text to read the book. Any help in accomplishing this task would be greatly appreciated. I also have a 18-105mm 1:3.5-5.5 G. That didn't seem to give me what I was looking for. Someone here said I needed a 1:1 macro lens. Need help figuring this out.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you wrote. Let me try to clarify your question first.
When you say that you don't get the entire page in the shot, do you mean that you can't get just the page in the shot, that you have what's around the page in the shot, or that there are words and sentences missing from your shot?

If you have words or paragraphs missing, you'll have to move the camera back from the book to cover a wider area. If you have too much around, you'll have to crop what you don't want in post processing. The page format might not match the proportion of the camera's sensor perfectly.

Hope this helps.

An additional area of thought is that no book will lie perfectly flat. Most of the time the pages arc from the spine out to the edge. Depending on the focus point and the DOF, parts can appear blurry. Try to get the page as flat as possible.

You will get similar effect if the camera is oriented somewhere other than directly over the page.

Thank you for your response. The background is very gray. The words are blurred.

newbieswago said:

Thank you for your response. The background is very gray. The words are blurred.

Click to expand...

What are you using to light the book's page? How far are you from the actual text? What camera settings are you using (aperture,iso,shutter speed)? How big is the book? Maybe photography is not the ideal media to do what you are looking for?

At very close focus, you have a very very very shallow depth of field. You need to find a way of keeping
your pages as flat as possable and I would use F11 here.
I assume your pages are white.... this is fooling the light meter in your camera... which assumes everything
is a midtone grey. Use your exposure compensation button and set +2 stops.