I have been thinking about how to take a really good photo graph of a decal on a bicycle. There exist panoramic cameras where the film is actually held in a 180 degree (or more) circle, and the lens / iris sweeps around the circular front of the camera so that the film is always perpendicular and the same distance to the lens, and there is no parallax error between subject and film.
You can pay $500 for such a panoramic "swing" camera and still get superb results (the $5000 ones that try to do it with optics can never take 270 degree pictures - but this one can.)
The exact same thing could be done, in reverse, for photographic frame decals. Just take 10" of 35 mm film and hold it in a semicircle around the frame tubes. then squeeze a lens and iris between the two items, in a "macro-panoramic" camera. You could get a perfect copy of a decal from a frame tube in this way. Lighting, however, would be a challenge.
Now, anybody interested in building such a device ?? It probably wouldn't cost that much to build, but you'd need some knowledge of camera construction to get good optical results....
- Don Gillies
San Diego, CA