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Imaging rare, unusual, and intriguing objects at the Brown University Library

Monthly Archives: March 2015

Black, blue, and gray all over

March 18, 2015 by | Comments Off on Black, blue, and gray all over

Last month a blue-and-black dress sparked a mass-scale debate about color theory. Even the New York Times and magazines like Wired eventually weighed in, explaining how color perception is contingent upon context and light sources.

In honor of the unexpected media attention to color theory, Curio features below a gray-and-black dress from c. 1866, reproduced from Fashion in Paris: the Various Phases of Feminine Taste and Aesthetics from 1797 to 1897 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1898) for the Library’s Paris: Capital of the 19th Century online project (the project’s items are also available via the Brown Digital Repository).

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Page from Digital Production Services

This illustration was hand-colored for Uzanne’s book, and the tones used to represent the dress were not painted as scientifically neutral-gray hues. Traditional representational painters counsel “never use black paint” when rendering scenes, since in reality even black rarely visually appears as “pure” black, depending on the particular light sources illuminating an area. Scanning or digitally photographing hand-painted artwork often only exacerbates color uncertainty, if images are captured without a known neutral-gray or neutral-white reference point. For example, the same page illustration, scanned for Google Books’ digitized version of the volume, ends up looking even more blue-cast, at least in part due to the contrast-boosting post-processing applied to Google Books’ page images:

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Page from Google Books

To test your color perception, try X-Rite and Pantone’s Online Color Challenge (taking the test on a calibrated and profiled monitor definitely helps). By chance, coinciding with the media frenzy about the black dress on Tumblr, the philosopher of perception and consciousness David Chalmers — who has written about color perception — was giving a series of Royce Lectures at Brown, February 24–27.

The Unicorn of the Sea Comes to Brown

March 10, 2015 by | 2 Comments

I often write about techniques to photograph unusual objects, or situations that involved photographing objects on site. This past Friday, however, we had the unique pleasure of photographing a very rare and unusual object while it was being installed for exhibition.  My colleague and I photographed a narwhal tusk from the Paul C. Nicholson Whaling Collection of the Providence Public Library, on loan to Brown for the exhibit Unicorn Found: Science, Literature and the Arts. The exhibit, as well as a special Unicorn Colloquium the afternoon of March 11, are part of the larger, multi-institution Unicorns in Residence: Providence event this spring.

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The Narwhal tusk is remarkable to view in person; I was surprised at its size (56″ long), and its hollow, spiral structure. In a previous discussion about photographing this object, it was decided that the safest and most efficient time for photography was during installation of the tusk, so it would be handled as little as possible and by the folks who specialize in handling these materials. (While my colleagues and I are familiar with many special handling techniques for rare and fragile objects, the narwhal tusk requires multiple people to handle, and while its age is unknown it is a decidedly delicate object.) All object handling was done under the direction of Jordan Goffin, Special Collections Librarian at the Providence Public Library, with the assistance of Rachel Lapkin, Materials Conservator at Brown (who also made the stands that support the tusk), and Sarah Dylla, a Public Humanities graduate student at Brown working on a fellowship in Special Collections.

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The tusk in its display case at the Hay, prepared for photography with gray backdrop and studio lights. The camera, tethered to an out-of-frame laptop, is mounted on a tripod on a table to obtain a suitable height and distance from the object.

The tusk is housed in a display case that can be viewed either from the main lobby or the Grand Reading Room at the Hay. After looking at the space prior to photography, we decided to photograph the tusk in its display case, with a neutral gray backdrop set up temporarily for photography. We set up the backdrop, two lights to illuminate the tusk, and then the tusk was moved into place. We had decided to photograph it from several angles – straight on, and from multiple side and front views –  so we made several images from one vantage point, and then moved on to additional angles and views.

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Alternate views and detail of the narwhal tusk.

The tusk, and a number of other curious unicorn-related materials, will be on display in the John Hay Library in the renovated lobby cases and Willis Reading Room cases from March 11 – July 31, 2015.

 

Capturing the Transit of Venus

March 2, 2015 by | 1 Comment

Recently, as part of Brown’s 250th celebration, my colleague and I were asked to photograph a selection of the many historical objects at Brown. Among these was the Transit of Venus telescope, a Gregorian reflecting telescope made by Watkins and Smith of London, and donated to the University by Joseph Brown. The telescope is named for the event it was purchased to observe: the movement of Venus across the sun. The transit of Venus was observed by Brown, Benjamin West, and others on June 3, 1769 – and more recently on June 5, 2012.

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The final version of the Transit of Venus telescope, photographed on site in the Lownes Room.

Thankfully, my colleague and I did not need to address any planetary movements to photograph this object; however, we did need to photograph it on-site in the Lownes room at the John Hay Library. We brought our backdrop, lights, and camera, and it was a relatively simple setup. We were careful to set up the camera so that the lens and angle of view did not distort the telescope in any way; our main challenge was actually positioning the lights. The telescope is incredibly reflective, and while changes in tone help show the shape of the telescope, and some highlights are useful for showing surface texture, initially we were getting long streaks of blown-out highlights, causing a visual distraction within the overall image.

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Our straightforward lighting setup gets the job mostly done – all we have to deal with is the large highlight streak in the center of the telescope.

After trying multiple approaches – from changing the position and distance of the lighting, to a system of reflectors – we decided that our best option was to make two captures to merge together. To keep image distortion to a minimum, we decided to keep the setup largely the same, but to reposition the angle of one of the lights for each shot. Once finished, we had one image that was properly exposed except for a blown-out streak on the right side; and another with the lighting problem on the left. Layered in Photoshop, it was easy to merge the images to create a single image that accurately captures the telescope without the distracting highlight.

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The two vies of the telescope – the only differences are the positions of the highlights, created by repositioning and changing the angle of our lighting equipment to reduce the glare.