Colin White Photography and Digital Imaging

Photography in the Cultural Heritage Sector

Tag: Photography of works of art

A bit of an update

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It’s been a few weeks since I last updated this blog so I thought I’d start with a picture taken earlier in the year entitled, “You’re not a goldfish”. Great fun taking the pictures, especially when the family of walkers came past.

You're not a goldfish
You’re not a goldfish

It’s been a busy few weeks doing some installation photography, delivering a colour management lecture to digital humanities students at UCL and training students and staff to use the equipment at their new digitisation suite. Also spent a couple of days with some colleagues from the Association for Historical and Fine Art Photography (AHFAP) at the Museum Associations 2013 conference in Liverpool to promote good photographic practise encompassing capture, output, preservation and image asset management. Thanks to all those who stopped and had a chat and I hope we were helpful.

Had a great day at the AHFAP conference at Tate Modern. I only managed the morning session due to work commitments but really enjoyed the presentations by Sarah Saunders on the role of the photographer and metadata in heritage workflow, Gwen Jones of the Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care (CHICC) at the John Rylands Library talking about the use photography to investigate rare manuscripts amongst other work they carry out and Maureen Pennock from the British Library who spoke about short and long term preservation of heritage content.

I’m now getting back to sorting out some material for the new AHFAP eResource site which should be up and running early next year and doing tests to improve colour and tone reproduction in the photography of flat copy works. Should have something sorted out soon.

 

The Association for Historical and Fine Art Photography annual conference 2013

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The Association for Historical and Fine Art Photography annual conference 2013 takes place on Thursday 14th November. If haven’t already got a ticket you may need to hurry. There are very few tickets remaining.

There is a really strong set of presentations this year covering a variety of aspects of photography in the cultural heritage sector. If you have an interest in this field I suggest you book asap, the last time I looked there were fewer than 10 tickets remaining.

The full list of speakers can be found at the link below:

http://www.ahfap.org.uk/conferences/2013-uk-conference/

2013 AHFAP UK Conference – Call for papers

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The 2013 AHFAP UK Conference will be held on Thursday 14 November in the Starr Auditorium at Tate Modern, London.

Innovating out of Austerity

For the first time, the conference will have a broad theme, and this year it is ‘Innovating out of Austerity’. We have now had three years of austerity, so how are image-makers in the UK cultural heritage sector adjusting to these changes, what new practices are being introduced and what innovations made?
The theme is not exclusive and papers on other topics and techniques relevant to our sector are equally welcome.
It is planned that the timetable will accommodate papers of 15-, 30- and 45-minute durations. Please submit your proposals to info@ahfap.org.uk by Monday 30 September.

For further information and to book a place at the conference see http://www.ahfap.org.uk/conferences/2013-uk-conference/

Panorama’s

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Ski resort Les Contanimes, France.
Ski resort Les Contanimes, France.
Olympic Stadium, Stratford.
Olympic Stadium, Stratford.

A couple of panorama’s produced using Photomerge and some handheld images taken with a compact camera. The first is from Les Contanimes, France. The second is from an evening at the Paralympic games last summer. I’ve used photomerge in the past to produce giga pixel images of works of art under strict lighting and exposure conditions  but thought I’d produce a couple of images using some quick hand held images to see how well it works.

Photographing Works of Art

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Colour Managed Photograph of a Work of Art
Colour Managed Photograph of a Work of Art

When photographing an artists work of art it is important that the capture is optimized to ensure the integrity of the work whilst maximising the detail of the original. This can only be done by optimising the entire capture process.

To optimize the capture system the following criteria needs to be reviewed:

  • Ensure the maximum Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) is used to extract maximum detail.
  • Ensure your optical system is optimised for the lighting system that is used. Not all lighting systems are the same and in general the more you pay the better the system. This doesn’t mean a cheaper system cannot be used, just that a little more care maybe required to get the best results.
  • Ensure the signal to noise ratio of the system is set to give maximum detail. This usually just means setting the lowest ISO value on the camera.
  • There is a means to manage and understand the colour of the image to those without access to the original art work. At a base level this can mean just having a known colour chart within the image plane as a reference.
  • Make sure the image colour space is suitable for the uses you want the files to be used for in the future. Most monitors are sRGB but the print industry like Adobe RGB. There are other spaces that could also be suitable and some that are much larger but you would need to decide whether these are suitable for you.
  • Capture the work at an identical tone to the original. This means if your original is dark and with little contrast the captured image reflects that. If for output purposes this doesn’t reproduce well later then you can always tweak the image to your satisfaction although this would be best done in a separate layer of the image file to preserve the integrity of the original capture.
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