lelgin | c u r i o

The Art School Down the Hill

November 7, 2013 by lelgin | Comments Off on The Art School Down the Hill

Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design are within steps of each other, so it’s no surprise that the two have a great deal of overlap in the community. While my full time work is as a photographer at Brown, I have taught photography at RISD (also my alma mater) in their Continuing Education department since 2002. I often use examples from my work at Brown to talk about lighting, lens selection, and other photographic techniques. I was advisor to RISD|CE’s digital photography certificate program for ten years, and during that time I would bring students to Brown to view our studio setup, and talk about the safe handling and digitization of cultural heritage materials.

It is due to my personal connection to RISD and RISD|CE that I was so excited to come across materials over a century old from RISD while photographing at Brown. I’ve been working on digitizing broadsides from the late 1800s, and have found several items from RISD, including bulletins introducing their evening drawing courses for men, art needle work courses for women, listings of their daytime, evening, and youth course schedules, and even an application to the school. As we continue to work our way into the turn of the century, I’m hoping we find even more.

The RISD bulletins are part of the Rider Broadsides collection, which contains a wide range of books, pamphlets, manuscripts, broadsides, ephemera, scrapbooks and newspapers from the 17th through the early 20th centuries. Named for the collector, Sidney S. Rider, Rider Broadsides is the largest private collection of Rhode Island-related materials, and we expect this digitization project to keep us busy for the better part of the academic year.

No tannins at all, and very little fruit (part II)

September 26, 2013 by lelgin | Comments Off on No tannins at all, and very little fruit (part II)

This post is part two of the “No tannins at all, and very little fruit” post from Sept. 6, 2013. The first post outlines how I approached photographing the bottle of wine from the Archives; this post details the uncorking of the bottle and what we found inside.

Once the photography had been completed, it was time to empty out the wine and pass the bottle on to the materials conservator. A group of us were on hand for the uncorking: our conservator, university archivist, senior library specialist in manuscripts, and rare book cataloger. It was essential that the most important part of the bottle – the handmade label – remain intact, so the folks removing the cork and emptying the bottle had to be incredibly careful that no liquid came into contact with the label.

Once the seal was removed, it was evident that the cork was indeed the source of the leak, and would be a challenge to extract from the bottle.

Using a variety of tools – from a simple corkscrew to tools from the Conservator’s lab – the team went to work to remove the cork completely.

However, it became clear that the cork was actively disintegrating and salvaging the entire cork would be impossible.

After removing as much of the cork as possible, the decision was made to push the remaining cork into the bottle and pour out the wine. Some samples of the wine were collected, while the rest had to be poured down the sink. We noticed, after looking at the samples in a beaker and a drinking cup, that there was more than a little sediment. A quick taste-test by one of our more adventurous library folks provided the assessment that the almost 50-year-old wine had “no tannins at all, and very little fruit.”

No tannins at all, and very little fruit (part I)

September 6, 2013 by lelgin | Comments Off on No tannins at all, and very little fruit (part I)

Perelman Papers, Box 11

Such was the assessment of a leaking bottle of wine from the manuscripts collection (by a library staff member who dared to take a sip). There’s more to this story, and I was lucky enough to be able to both participate in and document the first few chapters.

As preparations began for the 14-month closure of the John Hay Library (Brown’s Special Collections Library), workers readying items for transport to offsite storage noticed that a box in the S.J. Perelman Papers (part of the Archives) was leaking. Inside was a bottle of wine, which had been safely housed in the Hay’s vault for decades; at some point, however, the cork had become unstable and had begun to leak wine. It was clear that the bottle would have to be emptied and sent to our materials conservator. Before (fully) breaking the seal and removing the wine, the bottle was brought to me so that I could document it in its unaltered state. While the most crucial part of this process was to capture and preserve the hand-drawn label, we also wanted to have a record of the object in its original state.

Wine bottle at the ready, I set up our reprographic camera stand to use as a shooting table. Because our strobes have narrow softboxes on them (perfect for documents and books, not so perfect for three-dimensional objects), I used our portable hotlights with umbrellas. Photographing glass is tricky; it’s best to light it from behind, using bounced light to give the object its shape and prevent distracting reflections. However, in this case I needed to show the glass, the liquid inside, as well as the label on the front. I used one light to illuminate the scene, with particular attention paid to the label. I used the other light as a handheld light; I held it by the light stand, and used a variety of angles and distances from the bottle to get the lighting I wanted.

In the interest of thoroughness, I photographed the bottle from the front, back, and sides. The most difficult shot was the back of the bottle, as the label prevented me from lighting through the bottle, and made the surface of the glass highly reflective. I could get myself out of the frame, but both the camera I was using and the one mounted to the top of the repro stand were visible in the glass. I taped white paper over the top camera, which solved the problem easily. The camera directly in front of the bottle needed a bit more work. Using the lens cap, I traced a circle onto a piece of paper. I then cut that circle out, and mounted the paper on the camera (using the lens cap gives you a good approximation of the lens size). The resulting image has the expected specular highlights and reflections, but has minimized the obvious camera/room reflections.

Making the camera cover to reduce reflections.

The final images give a good sense of the bottle, the wine inside, and the label. To afford users a full view of the label, I combined three different shots of the bottle into one.

Front, back, and label views.

Next time, we’ll look at how we approached uncorking the bottle – and what its contents had in store for us.

P. as in Paul?

August 2, 2013 by lelgin | 1 Comment

While a great deal of the photography that I do here at Brown involves planned projects (often from our Signature Collections), we also get requests from patrons and scholars from around the world, as well as curators within Brown. These requests can be of very interesting and unusual materials, and it’s often a surprise what we get to photograph.

Last year, I was heading down to the bindery when I ran into Marie Malchodi, a book conservation technician, and Michelle Venditelli, the preservation manager. Marie had just discovered an engraving tucked into the pages of a science textbook donated by Solomon Drowne, class of 1773. It was signed:

The engraving had already been moved to the Hay Library, and inspected by Richard Noble, rare books cataloger. He was able to confirm that it is indeed P. Revere as in Paul Revere, and this particular engraving has only four other known copies. I kept my eyes peeled for it coming into the production requests, since I was hoping to get to see it in person and maybe even photograph it. When it came into my photography queue a week or so later, I was more than thrilled to get to interact so closely with such a rare and fascinating find.

It was a very exciting time here at the Brown University Library, and there was a great deal of publicity regarding the find. Among other news outlets, the New York Times and NPR both ran stories; Brown also made a special news post. And I got to snag a piece of the bragging rights!

Studio on the go

July 8, 2013 by lelgin | Comments Off on Studio on the go

The library Annex: known for housing a vast collection of books not stored in our on-campus libraries, it’s also home to an art vault for Brown’s portrait collection.

During the slower summer months, DPS has the time to turn its attention towards important projects that may not be as time-sensitive as work done during the academic year, but remain a vital part of the work of digitizing the collections of both the University Library and the larger institution. Many of these projects involve on-site work, where my colleague Ben and I travel to locations on and off campus to photograph rare and oversize objects.

One undertaking this summer has been work for University Curator and Senior Lecturer Robert Emlen, who has identified a number of paintings that require photography. Many of the works have been conserved, some have not been previously digitized, and several had been captured with older (c. 2003) digital technology.

Some of these paintings are part of the Rush C. Hawkins Collection, housed in the Annmary Brown Memorial. The majority of the works are from the Brown Portrait Collection, made up of paintings located all across the Brown campus. There are also a number of paintings stored at the library Annex, home to many volumes not currently stored on campus.

In order to capture these works as best as possible, we have a traveling setup that we bring with us. This includes our digital back, mounted on a medium format SLR, tripod, hot-shoe level, x-rite color checker card, tungsten light set with light stands and umbrellas, and a MacBook Pro with Capture One installed for tethered shooting. We also bring white foam core reflectors to even out lighting, and black foam core to reduce any unwanted light (which gives a nasty glare off oil paint). Below is a setup from a shoot in the Annex, where you can see most of this equipment brought into play.

Here’s the full setup, with the tethered laptop.

Testing this shot with the color checker card and hot shoe level. We’re purposely photographing the painting on its side to make the most of the camera’s 80MP sensor (without having to rotate the camera) as well as to ensure as even light spread across the painting as possible.

The painting we are photographing above is a portrait of Barnaby Keeney, the 12th president of the university. This is the final product:

Keeney, Barnaby Conrad (1914-1980) Artist: Feldman, Walter Portrait Date: 1961 Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 4 Framed Dimensions: Brown Portrait Number: 201

Keeney, Barnaby Conrad (1914-1980); Artist: Feldman, Walter; Portrait Date: 1961; Medium: oil on canvas; Brown Portrait Number: 201

The portrait was painted in 1961 by Walter Feldman (himself a Brown institution, now Professor Emeritus of Art); an interview with Professor Feldman for a celebration of BREATHTAKEN, a new collaborative publication released in 2012, can be found here.

Photographing Clara

May 31, 2013 by lelgin | Comments Off on Photographing Clara

As a followup to last week’s post about John Hay, I thought it would be a good time to discuss photographing the portrait of Clara Stone Hay. The wife of Brown alumnus John Hay, Clara Stone Hay’s portrait hangs in the John Hay Library, where the university’s special collections are housed. I was charged to photograph the portrait for the 2010 edition of Special Collections of the Brown University Library: A History and Guide.

The John Hay Library, home to many of Brown’s Special Collections.

Photographing the portrait was no easy feat. The painting had to be photographed in place; it is too large and too heavy to move for photography. This made controlling many aspects of the lighting incredibly difficult. The painting is done in oils, which have a reflectance that can range anywhere from a slight slimmer to a strong glare. Additionally, the painting is behind glass – and decidedly not the anti-glare variety. Both these obstacles can be dealt with through careful placement of the lighting, including adjusting the angle and directionality of the lights to minimize reflections. However, this painting is in a marble hallway, with windows and reflective surfaces at every turn. While no windows shine directly onto the painting, the light that they bring into the hallway not only interferes with the lights I had brought to illuminate the painting, but they also create hot spots and highlights on the work itself. The other paintings and objects in the hallway also create their own reflections in the glass.

The hallway in the John Hay Library where the portrait of Clara Stone Hay was photographed. Clara’s portrait is top right.

A tilt-shift lens, showing the shift to the right.

I’m a big believer in preempting as many imaging issues as possible during the actual capture. Because I had scouted this painting beforehand, I knew about the glass and the lighting issue. The primary challenge with the painting being behind glass is that there’s no way to photograph the painting straight on, without myself or the camera (or both) being directly reflected in the image. I brought in my tilt-shift lens (also called perspective control, described here) so that I could photograph the painting from the side.

The t-s lens allows the photographer to photograph an object from the side, above, or below, with keeping the lens parallel to the object (otherwise, we would see great distortion). This is called shift: the lens and film plane/digital sensor are parallel to the object and to each other, but the image circle shifts within the camera, allowing you to capture a different area of the scene than that which is directly in front of you.

I took multiple shots with the tilt-shift lens, bracketing for exposure. I was able to capture a faithful reproduction of the painting, which required very little processing. I had to fix some minor distortion on the right side of the frame – an artifact of the lens not being 100% parallel with the painting. I also had to reduce some of the reflections on the painting which were unavoidable – the painting opposite that of Clara could not be moved, and could not be removed during capture. The progress of these changes and the final version are shown below.

The stages of processing the Clara Stone Hay portrait.

A Great Gatsby; a poor speller

May 3, 2013 by lelgin | 5 Comments

Just in time for the release of the 2013 remake of the film, I came across this copy of The Great Gatsby.

This edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is notable for several reasons. It is a first edition from 1925. However, what makes it truly unique is the inscription; Fitzgerald dedicated this copy to T.S. Eliot. Although an “enthusiastic worshipper” of the poet, Fitzgerald has misspelled Eliot’s last name:

Copy of the first edition of The great Gatsby inscribed by F. Scott Fitzgerald to T.S. Eliot. Donated to the Brown University Library by Daniel Siegel ’57.

Detail showing the notation regarding T.S Eliot’s comments.

Written in pencil beneath the inscription is the barely discernible “Pencil comments by TSE.” Eliot read through the book, making comments in the margins in pencil throughout.

It should also be noted that I photographed this book differently than many of the items I digitize. In DPS, we often photograph books in a book cradle, page-by-page. However, this book was digitized for inclusion in the updated History & Guide, so I also provided photographs of the book as an object. I wanted to show the book as three-dimensionally as possible, and made a number of photographs showing it open in varying degrees, and from different angles.

A favorite shot is below, where you can see the front of the book. I had to use special lighting (a raking light from the right) to illuminate the blind-embossed title and author text.

View of spine, back and front of book.

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

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