The rig shown here was built from scraps of aluminum angle material along with some machined bolts and wing nuts. On the cross bar at the top a threaded rod holds a digital camera in place.
With adequate lighting in place to minimize glare from the flash unit on the camera, text, plans and other such things can be placed on the table below. Material being photographed in this way is always square to the lens and a fixed distance away.This makes it very easy and quick to photograph text and plans for digitization using optical character recognition (OCR) software or graphical tracing software.
