I had the interesting opportunity to photograph some archival documents, posters, paintings, etc at the residence of artist Richard Artschwager for an upcoming Whitney retrospective. Nothing too different in the photography, though I tested out a nice new portable tilt photo table (new meaning: my construction). Barring hauling a studio column this makes poster size flat works manageable on location with just a tripod. Also, though ceilings were not a problem here, the tilt table allows a shorter ceiling height. Anyway, it was a privilege to photograph the work and meet such an art luminary (lunch was great!). I can’t post any inside tour pics, but the converted church residence was a trip.

Artschwager

Artschwager

Poster

Blip Stencils

Alright, here it is, summer project 2011. Soooo much fun, well a little work.
I had the privilege of photographing 716 Walker Evans Polaroids over the course of two weeks. Kind of a hired gun situation (pardon the metaphor, remember I don’t shoot things!), but I wasn’t going to pass this up. Thanks to John ffrench, Josh Chuang, and the helpful PPD staff for having me, and helping me get through this many objects in only two weeks!

Cozy summer cave:

Studio Layout

 
Closer
Some closer views of the photography stand below here. Lights were cross polarized and Polaroids were held down under glass.

Photography Stand

Glass Hold Down

The Trick, ‘er Method
The trick (or more professionally sounding, the studied method) for this type of high volume / high quality project is a consistent, smooth workflow. Objects are batched out in chunks that make sense for both equipment and human attention. I’m pretty good at estimating how long something will take me in the early project planning phase (i.e. estimate of cost for client), but there is always a slightly panicky “rubber meets the road” period in the first day or two. I plan quite a bit and do test shooting on prop objects if needed. The goal of this project was high quality human inspected color correction (not what is often referred to as “rapid imaging”) for each object. The objects have been fading and changing over time and photographing them now as faithfully as possible at least creates a record for this time that will last.

Line 'em Up

 


The Nitty Gritty
Okay, so this chunk is a little techy and inside baseball, but read on if you like. The couple nice Polaroids are at the bottom, or visit the Project page once I have that up.

-Break It Down
So, how do you get through photographing, metadata entry, and color correction of ~80 objects per day without skipping a day (and remember that is two sides each)? It sounds easier perhaps than the reality. I found that two batches of 40 objects each per day was doable, and once going I was averaging about 2 and a half sets per day (so 100 objects/day). The 40 objects were pulled and separated into sets of 10. Remember that while grandma’s snaps are probably precious these are museum objects worth, I prefer not to know, let’s say lots. So handling a stack of 10 at the camera at one time is safe and I can maintain my concentration at camera capture well for that chunk. Forgetting to capture a back side after you’ve gone to the next object sounds easy to recover from, but it throws a wrench in sorting and the downstream workflow. I won’t elaborate further, it does. Messy is not what we want! 40 objects takes about as many minutes to fully capture, that’s capture, nothing else.

-Metadata
Now there is metadata. Get it in now after capture. Metadata entry is not very batch friendly as every two images have new numbers. There is no time savings to do it later and the lack of searchable, sortable metadata when trying to track down a possible error down the road will cost you a ton of time. Believe me as careful as you think you might be, after 700+ objects you will have made more than one mistake. Metadata of all sorts attached to files will be super helpful when crosschecking against an institution provided object list.

The main metadata entered was a MET number from said museum, that was also written in pencil on each object, and the Yale object ID number. The MET number was only added to a less used IPTC field and the Yale obj ID was inserted into the file name and the image title field. These were also prefixed in the IPTC fields with “MET” or “obj” so that if viewed by someone else there would be a chance they know to what the number refers. As mentioned the Yale object number was added to the file name, but I only inserted it in before my capture sequential counter. The reason again for this is possible sorting down the line. Of course you can sort files by capture time/date in the EXIF data, but my capture counter is still good to have. Having the more important Yale object ID number in two places for each image is also good for crosschecking errors. My belief is that within reason it is best to drag along as much embedded information until pruning and final naming for delivery. The tools for metadata batching and file renaming are so good that this makes sense.

I did the full 40 object (remember that’s 80 images) metadata chunk in one sitting. Not so bad, though time for a quick walk around after that (rub the eyes back to life). Straighten/rotate files with handy straighten tool before RAW processing (PS is about 3 more mouse clicks per image if you don’t, this seriously matters! And after waiting for 80 images to process to learn that you’d wish you had done it in RAW first you will learn that too.)

-Color Correction
Color Correction was by inspection as the above image shows. I lined up five Polaroids at a time (out of each 10 object capture pile) under a neutral light source to color correct directly against a processed out tiff file. I’ll get to dealing with computers, but one thing I had to relent on was to peel off dealing with backs and fronts. It took too much time to check them in sequence at this point. I created a basic set of color correction actions in PS to get the global object close (here some things are in your favor, like the white Polaroid boarder on the front and back should only need about the same custom adjustments). What matters most is custom inspection color correction for the front print area. After applying a basic set of adjustments consistent across all objects, custom adjustments were made if needed to ensure color accuracy. I found that as well as a predominance of cyan (I assume, prevalent from fading) there was a lot of red. Maybe the red had a good staying power, but it was there and often the straight captures had this a little off. The collection has many portraits and the amount of red in faces/complexions had to be manually controlled.

The studio computer would reliably not choke with 20 front images open at once, so again a balance was made between different batch chunks at different stages. One might reasonably ask, why open 20 front images when I was only lining up 5 objects at a time to inspect. Well the reason is that PS and I will be quicker doing the grunt work of opening and applying my basic set of actions on 20 than smaller batches. As well once I get through the 20 I trigger a save and close action that gives me time to work with the objects while the computer does it’s work. Saving in PS takes time. If you can reliably have 20 images open and do all adjustments (without a crash) before saving, this saves time. I might sound insane to the reader, but efficiency of action matters. The Polaroid backs required less custom color attention and mostly just received only the basic action recorded color correction the front images initially received on open. As well either because I was slightly less cautious or file size made the difference, I found I could open 40 back images at a time and work reliably.

-Computers and Humans
We both have our strengths and weaknesses. As a common human I have a basic ability for attention, specifically sustained attention. This as I mentioned earlier is one reason that I only captured sets of 10 objects at a time. I found that the quick break after ten, aside from object safety, gave me enough of a relief to get through 4 sets of 10 with no errors. As specialized and “high end” as I’d like to make this sound the capture process is repetitive.
-Clean the glass, lift glass, un-sleeve object, anti-static brush, manual puff, place object, lower glass, keyboard shortcut for capture, lift glass, flip object, anti-static brush, manual puff, place object, lower glass, keyboard shortcut for capture, lift glass, re-sleeve object – Repeat. I space out at repetitive tasks.

Humans are better at perceiving subtlety in objects. We are pretty fancy at this compared to computers so as much of my energy as possible was conserved for the color correction of each individual Polaroid image area.

Computers are good at concentrating, but when you feed them too much they barf (well maybe more accurately they have a stroke). I was kindly provided this photography space because it made the most sense for the objects (no travel, safe) and the least disruptive to surrounding operations. That is awesome and there was some savings because much of my equipment was not used. On the other hand the shear volume this MacPro computer was not used to. Day one of capturing choked the single internal drive. Day two I added a large internal striped volume for some speed, an external backup volume, and a zippy SSD internally for a proper PS scratch volume. Then I was able to do things like open 20 or 40 (350-385mb) files, work with them, and save without a time losing crash.

Computers are also good at doing repetitive tasks so give them as many to do as possible so you don’t. I use PS actions and scripted launches all the time for even small things, but when you start dealing with larger numbers of files and larger file sizes any individual action that can be applied to more than one file must be batched.

Results
A couple stand outs (in my humble opinion, each for different reasons):

NO!	Walker Evans	Sink
Desert Shadow	Friedlander	Angel
Eco Cans	Lights	Birds

Here is a quick behind the scene panorama with one instrument up on a table to photograph the sound board.

keyboard setup pano

Same instrument as finished image.

Instrument Soundboard

Fun group and day, can’t wait to come back again!
Cg

Jules Olitski’s Third Indomitable is all of 18+ feet long. The kind folks at FAE Boston unwrapped and provided a space large enough to photograph. Aside from masking off the shiny ducting above nothing was too difficult aside from backing up far enough and getting an even light spread. In the uncropped image below you can see the painting leaning against the warehouse wall on foam blocks.

Jules Olitski, Third Indomitable

Cg

I had the opportunity to photograph 38 of these “Minis” as they are known for short. This was a similar collaboration with the Yale University Art Gallery as I’ve done in the past, like 1000+ Ancient Coins and Swid Powell. Three weeks were spent photographing the objects, recto and verso (front and back). Some of the objects were the same published ten years ago in Robin’s book Love and Loss at the early stages of digital photography. The reason to re-shoot many of these objects years later was to capture them as high resolution original RGB files that can be properly managed and archived. Unfortunately, in some cases the images retained from ten years ago were CMYK converted files and of only 1:1 resolution. The images I made of course are wide gamut 16bit RGB tiffs, often with a possible magnification of 5:1 if printed (300dpi) and even larger when displayed at screen resolution (72dpi). The remaining images are newly photographed objects on long term loan or as promised gifts.

Photographing these unique objects provides not only publication quality images, but also highly valuable research possibilities with high resolution reproductions. The Art Gallery is also planning to use these images at digital exhibition kiosks next to the originals on display. The public will be able to see both sides of the Minis and zoom digitally in to minute details.

Below are a couple choice objects. Check out the Minis project page , where you can see some zoomify examples (see detail up close) and more images. Unfortunately I can’t show all images (loan or promised gift objects are excluded).

Mini Portrait	Verso	Mini Portrait	Verso
Mini Portrait	Verso	Mini Portrait	Verso
Mini Portrait	Verso	Mini Portrait	Verso

Thanks to the helpful Art Gallery staff and especially Robin Jaffee Frank, Alice and Allan Kaplan Senior Associate Curator American Paintings and Sculpture at Yale University Art Gallery.

The Art Gallery art handlers had just recently put all the main pieces together and removed cardboard that had been protecting the floor boards. You can see all the parts pre-assembly here (scroll down some, not my image so come back). The framed in room will be taken apart after some more conservation and reinstalled at the Yale Art Gallery in a year or two. The open wall sections and ceiling will be plastered in once reinstalled. Cool!

Thanks to Emily, Eric, and Tom for letting me into their secluded workspace.

Chris

This Bone Rocking Chair by the artist Charles LeDray was photographed for an upcoming, and then traveling, exhibition at ICA Boston. Actual object will not be in show, but my image will be used in the show catalog and publicity. Show is called “Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork”, and is at the ICA Boston, Whitney Museum of American Art, and then Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

First image here is one of my final images (made three). Middle image was emailed to me ahead of arrival. And last, granted a snapshot out of a book, the image I was improving upon, previously published.

Bone Rocker, Charles LeDray

Reflections on Glass

Previously Published Image

Bone Rocking Chair is in the collection of Samuel R. Peterson (Connecticut), and thank you to him for allowing me into his home.

Images were captured with the relatively simple setup as seen below in the production still gallery. The coins photographed varied from about 4cm to .5cm in diameter. Print size (aka indication of image resolution) from my captures was on average over 16cm. Obverse and reverse images were combined into one final image with a reference scale. Varying amounts of extension were required from about 56mm to over 200mm. As can be imagined depth of field was nearly non-existent and so for many of the smaller coins a post production technique called focus stacking was employed to get sharp images of lumpy objects.

Macro Setup	Viewfinder	Tiny Coin
Tiny Coin 2	Mobile Setup	Gold Coin

Update: Check out the project page I made for the 1000+ coins where you can see some zoomed details, project specs and a wall of coins.

Thanks so much to John Stuart Gordon for having me and all the effort polishing all the silver. The project was a pleasure.

Capture Screen

Object with shrouded lens

This nutty piece was shot with two different light set ups and pieced together to remove highlights on the green glass vase (as seen in single capture on monitor above), but keep some additional light on the large metal gold bowl.

Finished Image

I could post many neat looking design objects like Steven Holl’s Oil Can creamers or the Tigerman building tea service. Maybe I’ll post a link with a special Swid Powell gallery if I get a chance. UPDATE: Link to gallery of Swid Powell objects.

Anyway, keeping with the behind the scenes theme, there were many a single plate (charger) to photograph. My secret thanks goes to Tony DeCamillo, a staff photographer at YUAG for a perfect plate back drop. Plates were photographed safely on their back and then dropped into the background. Oh my god, this made blazing through about 40 plates a breeze.

Behind the Curtain

Mappelthorpe design, finished image

Chris

Early European paintings

Thanks to the collector for letting me into their home and especially John for handling all the art and Linsey from the Art Gallery.