 Hello everybody and welcome to this afternoon's webinar. My name is Mike Morneau. I'm with Learning Times. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. And we're going to get started in just a moment's time. Before we get things underway, I just want to remind participants that the webinar is being recorded and you'll be able to access the recording from the Connecting to Collections Care website in the coming days. If at any point in time you encounter any issues with the audio or perhaps you're not seeing slides advancing, please feel free to let us know in the chat at the lower left of your screen. Without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and pass things off to our host, Robyn. Go ahead, Robyn. Hi everyone. Welcome to another Connecting to Collections Care webinar. This one is called Basics of Collection Photography. We're really excited to have everyone here today. Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Robyn Bauer-Kilgo. I am the coordinator for C2C Care. And you just heard from our producer, Mike, over at Learning Times. Like he said, if you have any issues with audio or anything else, feel free to throw them in the chat. We have learned in these fun times of kids and virtual learning and everyone working from home that sometimes bandwidth gets used a lot in our location. So if you have to and stuff seems to be dragging, feel free to refresh the entire browser. Sometimes that jump starts it, but also, you know, it might be a little laggy, especially if you have, like me, two virtual learners at home. Quick introduction to our website online. It's ConnectingToCollections.org. You will find all sorts of fun stuff on that website, including our archives. Our archives hold over, gosh, a bunch of webinars. This program's been around since 2010. You can find it on all sorts of subjects. So feel free to do the search if you need to. We also have a really good resources section of different resources that have been collected across the web on all different types of subjects of collections care. So if you're interested in learning about that, please do so. We also have a discussion forum. Our discussion forum is a protected area that can be moderated by conservators. So if you have a question concerned with collections care, you can post a question on there. They will go along to our monitors and our conservation experts, and they will get back to you with some really great information. So feel free to click on the Discussions tab and you will be getting information from there. We also have two homes on social media. We have Facebook.com over at C2C Community. And on Twitter, we are at C2C Care. Both those areas we post when webinars go up. We post all sorts of fun information on there. So if you're on either one of those platforms, please join us. A quick note about our upcoming calendar. We just did a webinar back on August 26 called Care and Curation of Archaeological Collections for Museum. This one is currently up on our website, connectingtocollections.org. It was a great webinar and I would encourage anyone if you have to deal with archaeological collections to head over there and take a look at it because it was recorded. On October 21st, we have another free webinar coming up. It's called Care of Outdoor Sculptures. We're working on the course description of it right now, but we're going to be having some folks, different parts of the country, and talk a little bit about just how they care for outdoor collections and outdoor items. So if you're interested in that, please go to our website and I will put out a nice big notification whenever registration is open. We are also going to be announcing, probably at the end of this week, a course that C2C Care is going to be putting on. The courses, we do charge for those. A nominal fee for you to join. It's a series of five webinars that you can be doing through October to November. The topic is going to be physical media to digital storage, migrating audio-visual files. So if you are like me and at different times you have all sorts of fun different media types floating around back in your collections, things like flash drives, zip drives. I can't remember what else. Probably not punch cards, but other types of fun things that media can be on. This course will actually lead you on how to get it into digital storage. Oh, and I just saw in our chat, someone was asking about our Twitter handle. It's at C2C Care. So if you want to join us on Twitter, head over there. Quick note about our platform. You will see over on the side there is the chat area which everyone is doing great at. So I won't talk too much more about that. Basically enter in a phrase you want to say, hit send and it should be posted. I'll be moderating and keeping an eye on the chat the entire time. So if you have a question during our webinar please feel free to post it there and I will be sure to keep it for the end of the time. We also have a links area that you can go look at. Within the links area we have a fabulous bit of resources that our presenter put together for today. So if you're interested in this topic for further you can click on that. There's also an evaluation link that I will talk about a little bit more at the end of the webinar. Before I go much farther, I would like to acknowledge that this webinar is being moderated on the traditional lands and the Mikazuki and Seminole people and their ancestors. I pay my respect to those elders both past and present so we want to make sure to acknowledge that. And now I'm going to go ahead and introduce our topic for today, Basics of Collections Photography. Our speaker today is Jennifer McLean-Cee Sexton. She is a conservator in private practice in Colorado. She specializes in photographs, works on paper, and conservation imaging. And I'm going to go ahead and hand the mic over to Jennifer. Hi, I'm here. I hope everyone's doing well today. And then I'm going to switch over to my slides, I think. Yeah, so today I'm speaking to you from Colorado Springs, Colorado, which is part of the unscrupulous lands of the Ute, Gyan, Hikariah Apache and Sea Peoples. I would like to acknowledge these tribes and pay my respect to their past, present, and future elders. So thanks for joining today. As Robin mentioned, I'm a conservator in private practice. I received training in Fine Art Photography before going into conservation. And my conservation training was at the Buffalo program, where I learned under Dan Koshel. So a lot of what I present and how I practice was informed by that training. I learned value of practical scography that can be executed quickly, consistently, and professionally. I spent most of my career in private practice or regional centers. So the bottom line tends to be important and this really informs my practice. So just a brief outline of what I want to go through today. You know, just to begin, this is really an introduction. Photography is a rich subject. So my intent is to introduce some core concepts and give you tools to make decisions about equipment and getting started or simply to evaluate images that are presented to you. At the end, I'll point you towards some resources to learn more in depth and some topics. Or you can always reach out to me directly and I'll give you my contact information at the end of the webinar. And I really hope that you will learn some tips to improve your imaging and your decision-making about documentation in general. There should be plenty of time for a question at the end of the lecture. So to begin, we'll just talk about some considerations. When you sort of start either a documentation project, a photography project, or just when you're setting up a space, then we'll talk about some equipment choices and then how to set up a documentation space and the lighting in particular. Then a little bit about archiving files and workflows and the importance of workflows and then some resources at the end. So just some things to consider probably before you get started. Definitely the budget you have available for those who need to purchase equipment. That's going to be a huge consideration for what you decide to purchase and then the staffing you have available for the photography as well in their time. And then the time allotted to either collect the images themselves or the project if it's like an open and shut kind of project. What's its timeline? Is there going to be new equipment purchased specifically for this thing to go forward? And Mike, do you want to... Can you just check in about the audio? Yeah, the audio doesn't sound actually that bad for me at all. Are you able to... It does sound a little muffled, but muffled isn't even right. There's definitely something there, but yeah, if you're wearing a headset, if you just want to move it away from your mouth a little bit. Okay, I'll try. Is that any better? Yeah, let's give that a try for a bit. Okay. So if your timeline is short, then you might be limited on the amount of changes you can make to your existing setup or the equipment that you could buy. And so the use of the images, the end of the project, it's really one of the biggest considerations I would say. So is it for internal use, like for a collections database or for conservation documentation? Is it going on the website or is it going in publication? So definitely either it's going to go in a publication you might need to consider that the quality of the images will have to be higher and that you might need either imaging done or professional help to get the images the way that you want them to be. And then another thing is whether you're documenting the condition of the object, so for treatment purposes or conservation documentation, or you're just simply trying to get the information on the artifact itself, so inscriptions, color, its appearance. So those are kind of two different goals. I'm not saying that they can't both be done at the same time, but your use is going to inform the kind of pictures that you take. And then again, access is going to be important so if it's difficult to access the materials you need to document, you might have to tailor either where the documentation space is or when that documentation occurs and then size limitations as well. Larger things are going to be much more challenging to document well than small items. And then I'm a conservator, so safe handling is my paramount for me. So some things I'm always thinking about, how can we reduce handling of the object? Can it be safely documented or does it need treatment in order to be fully documented? There's a number of things to consider here and I always suggest handling the object as few times as possible, especially if it's unstable. Photography can really expressly reduce handling since the photograph can be made accessible more widely than the artifact can be a benefit of documentation. But I do want to stress that it's important that any staff handling our VAX are trained in object handling. There is real potential for damage during documentation, whether it's by moving it physically to the documentation space or just because you're concentrating on doing something else instead of on the object itself. So just safe handling is very important to think about. And then storage. Do you have a place to store digital files? Are you going to want to access them? How widely are they going to be accessed? And then you need to ensure that they can be backed up. The worst thing would be to spend all that time and money taking X on photographs and then move them because of a crash or a hard drive crashed. And so the first thing I really want to talk about is targets. And I want to do that because they're really a valuable tool for documentation. So adding targets to your image is the single most important thing you can do to improve your imaging. They provide known RGB values in the image with an exposure and white balance. And these examples on the screen all include a set of neutral patches from black to white. So any of those patches can be used to correct or evaluate white balance. And then equal red, green and blue numbers when you're measuring with the photo software would indicate a neutral white balance. And so for standardized exposure, usually you're going to want these gray patches for most of the conservation workflows. That would be the second one next to the white to get to an RGB value of 200. And then really including these targets in your images provides visual indicators of image quality and tools for future viewers to evaluate and understand the images. And so on this slide there are a few examples of targets. So any visual documentation should include an object identification so that could be the accession number or just a title and artist of a piece. Measurement scales, color and gray scales, light angle and direction indicators which are a little harder to see I think here. But these made for collections imaging like the ones on the left of the screen already include all of these factors. And they're usually long and thin so they could be placed alongside the artifact without choosing up too much space, too many pixels. And so the color checker passport which is the one on the right is a little bit more rectangular. It actually folds up. And this can take up a lot of space in your images, if you're imaging the artifact. But it is still useful because it can be cropped out. You could just leave the gray patches and then the outline of colors in order to mimic the conservation targets. But it also can be used to create custom camera profiles using free software from X-ray which is a company that sells this target. It's also much more widely available than the conservation targets on the screen so the one on the bottom, the AIC PhD target is actually no longer being produced in this iteration. Robin Myers has updated it and it's available on his website now again but that was only very recent. And so just continuing about targets I won't get too much into these guidelines but the Federal Agency's Digitization Guidelines Initiative which is FADGI is a collaborative effort that was started in 2007 by several federal agencies to communicate sustainable practices and guidelines for digitization. And so this has really made in order to provide guidelines within these institutions to make sure that their born digital content is up to current standards. And so if you're required to meet these guidelines you're going to need specialized targets to calibrate your system and so these are some examples of this. And so specialized object level and device level targets are used and usually compared and evaluated using software. So the device level targets allow performance measurements over a large field of view and then measure illumination, uniformity, spatial distortion and resolution variability just to ensure quality control. And so the object level targets can be included with the artifact itself to make sure that they conform to that same standard over time. And so there are tiers of requirements that might be in place in institutions or for contrast based work and they ensure that the equipment is calibrated to create images that are very consistent and also up to current standards. So but if you're required to conform to these standards with your collection photography or specific project you might consider additional training in using these targets and the software that would streamline the evaluation of your system but it's really beyond the scope of this webinar. So I want to move in to start talking about some cameras and I'm not going to talk about all the cameras that are possible to use obviously. I just want to talk about some of the most common ones and of course there are other options like we implement or even film cameras but really I'm talking about digital cameras and digital single lens reflex cameras which are digital SLRs are probably the most commonly used. But I do just want to talk a little bit about film photography or mobile device photography and then also mirrorless cameras which can be a good alternative from a digital SLR because they can be lightweight and there's really a lot of innovation happening in that industry right now. So this diagram shows sort of like an X-ray weird view of a digital SLR and so this would be the camera body and not the camera lens, so the lens on these kinds of cameras is going to be interchangeable but I won't get too much into the mechanics of this camera or how we use a specific camera because it's going to change a lot depending on which camera you ultimately use. So what I want to do instead of getting into specifics about for example this Canon I want to talk about what you're looking for when you're buying a camera and why. And so the first thing I want to talk about is the sensor size. So there are a few things like terms just to talk about here. So APSC is one size, full frame is another sensor size and then a mobile device might have a variable sensor size and I'll just show you some examples of that. But image quality is usually indicated by megapixels and so this is calculated just really by the amount of pixels in the area and then that's communicated to you in megapixels. But that's not really the whole picture so you would need to also consider the sensor size. This is my animation here. So this is not to scale obviously because I can't control the size of your screen but the largest square would be the full frame sensor so that's going to be the largest sensor of the DSLR that we're going to talk about. This full frame just essentially means that it's the size of 35mm film so it's not giant by any measurement but it's full frame as far as that SLR history goes. And then the next smallest square is the APSC sensor so those are more compact sensors and you'll see those on smaller digital SLRs or cheaper digital SLRs for sure and some of the mirrorless cameras as well. And then I just threw in this is just scale to each other but the iPhone sensor is going to be a lot smaller than for example a full frame so if you have a choice between a full frame digital SLR or your iPhone this is just one way to talk about how the digital SLR will be able to capture more information because its sensor is physically bigger. And so even though they might have the same number of megapixels if your iPhone has 8 megapixels you could have an older digital SLR because 8 megapixels and there's definitely some things to consider about the quality of each one the amount of pixels in the iPhone is going to be shoved into a smaller area than on the full frame. So in general it's better to have a bigger sensor even though it might have slightly smaller megapixels if it's an older generation. So I hope that's clear to everyone who can talk about that a little bit later. I don't want you to get too caught up in this sort of megapixel diagram I just want you to understand the difference between the sensor sizes and so just getting that megapixel number is not always the full picture. And so comparison tools can be really valuable and so this website is what I use to evaluate cameras it's called digital photography review which tends to be a relatively unbiased way to compare cameras and they also post reviews and there's camera buying guides that I guess you could do with a grain of salt but what I like the most is the side-by-side comparison tool so you can select a number of cameras that you're considering purchasing and it puts all of the relevant information right next to each other and you can compare those very clear information about the sensor size you'll get clear information about the sensor size the amount of pixels it's less sort of mumbo-jumbo from the advertisers and then it does allow you to make choices based on your budget and what you're trying to look for and you can compare those directly to each other and so there's a lot of things to consider when you're doing photography and so I won't go that much into specifics we'll talk about it a little bit when we get to work for it but just some things that are just quick and dirty tips to help you improve your documentation so for your camera settings definitely consider buying a camera that has an ability to use manual exposure even though you might not use it having that ability indicates that a camera can do that if you need it to and then you always want to get your ISO as low as possible and so for most cameras it's going to be between 100 and 200 ISO so you can certainly have a wide range of ISO a lot of cameras nowadays will go up very very high but there's always a trade-off for that so they'll end up being more noise or less ability to render great values so you can sort of hack any camera by getting the ISO as low as possible to reduce noise and then for f-stop when you're choosing your exposure you can just try to maximize the lens that you have and so it's usually sharpest at the middle of its f-stop range so that's usually for most lenses f8 or f11 I recommend shooting in raw capture because that gives the most post-processing abilities and less compression of your images so having a camera that can shoot in raw is really important so even if you don't use the raw images having that ability is valuable if you're purchasing the equipment and then the ability to save custom white balances either through the software or through the camera is really valuable especially if you have to move your documentation space so you don't just have one space dedicated to documentation and then tether capture which would be essentially your computer is attached to the camera and bring that system in order to capture the images can really help with the valuation of photographs which can improve the results so you can evaluate very quickly whether your exposure is off or your focus is off in order to make decisions before you could put the object away just a quick note about exposure so I'm a big fan of auto-exposure mode especially aperture priority this is one exposure mode in most cameras so that means you set the aperture and then the camera decides what the shutter speed is it's sort of an auto-exposure mode but a little bit more intelligent this can be really useful for quickly getting a good exposure but they only do one thing so the only thing in auto-exposure mode will do is expose your image to 18% gray which is sort of like most of the ground using the background here so most of the artifacts that you're going to be photographing are probably not 18% gray they might be more black or they might be more white so the camera is going to either over or under expose them because it's trying to get them to equal 18% gray so you do have to make some exposure adjustments often when using auto-exposure modes but it can help get you a little bit closer in order to shorten the time that you need or you can just use straight manual and evaluate your images as you go using that color checkers and again just some quick and dirty tips just talking about lenses and so fixed lenses tend to be better quality than zoom lenses just in general the zoom lenses have more moving parts it's going to be harder to reduce chromatic or physical aberrations so if you're concerned about sharpness or image quality you might consider selecting a fixed lens and using that but if you're more concerned about flexibility then zoom lenses are really valuable for that wide-angle lenses in general tend to have a lot more distortion so I would avoid definitely using a super wide-angle or even a super telephoto lens which is obviously less useful in this application but the wide-angle lenses you might need them if you're photographing something that's very large and there are some tools to correct that but there is a trade-off in image quality as well and then if you're really interested in comparing lenses in order to get the best quality there are tools to do that and they're called MF-2 graphs and you can usually find them for the specific lens that you're looking at and so learning how to read those MF-2 graphs and compare them can help you choose your lenses with more sophistication and then just the more general tips using as much light as it says for the subject is always going to help so more light is going to equal less noise, shorter exposure but you don't want to over-expose your object especially using older style lights that might be giving out heat for example and then use an established workflow or create a workflow in order to get your documentation consistent so that means consistent when you come back to take a photograph of something else or your colleagues are photographing in the same space or different parts of the collection so you can always start with a workflow that's being created by someone else but it almost always needs to be tailored for your specific system and setup because your camera might be different it's going to have different menus or different buttons could be just a different model same thing with your lighting, your documentation setup and then the software and post-processing and then I said it before on the slide about target but always include a call reference in your images so even if you crop it out later whether putting on the website or putting in the collections database and you don't want it to have the target in it, that's fine but the archival file should retain that call reference because over time it will become valuable to the next generation of people looking at this image. So I want to talk a little bit about software, you know I'm not trying to be a sales person for Adobe Photoshop because you know obviously it has limitations as well and it's not free but it is a standard software that is well known and there are a lot of works for conservation documentation that are available on this platform even though it's probably an older version it does save a lot of time and simplifies processing and then if you need support it's readily available. There's also a lot of training available for using Photoshop it's now moved to this online subscription system which reduces the upfront cost of the software but obviously you have to continue to pay it over time and over to continue to use the software. There are other options of course so Lightroom is also an Adobe product and it's just a different way of dealing with the file. Capture One is another well known both capture software and processing software that's also not free but is favored by photographers using higher end systems. Adobe Photoshop Express is free but it is on what you can do with that system. There's an open source Photoshop like system called GIMP and then ImageJ is also another open source image processing software that has different goals but can do a lot of the things that Photoshop can do. If you just need a raw processor there's one called Raw Therapy that's free and widely available. Any of the things that you're going to require a little bit of trying to get to know what that software can do and then possibly some training depending on what kind of level of documentation or processing you have to do. You really need to consider what your computer can actually do when thinking about this as well because if your computer can't run Adobe Photoshop then it doesn't make sense for you to subscribe to it. You might either have to consider an upgrade to your computer when you're budgeting for your project or consider another type of software that you can run or maybe limit the process in that can be done. Just getting into some lighting. These are some common lighting or common life available or types of lights mainly. These are not necessarily advocating for these brands but these are well known brands. I just want these are examples of the types. It used to be that most of the lights we use fluorescent or this tungsten halogen lights. Fluorescent ones are those large banks and you can get daylight balanced ones of those. The tungsten halogen bulbs are the ones that emit a kind of heat but are well known photo lights. On the bottom are the newer style so LED you can either see as this panel or as a more traditional looking light and so the LEDs are just sort of inside that. Light housing even though it might look like a bulb it's not an LED bulb. They have a lot of differences between these types of lights and too much about that but LEDs are really taking over this market and so you're going to see the LEDs are going to be cheaper and more widely available than even the fluorescent bulbs now or definitely the tungsten halogen bulbs. There's some good reasons for this mainly the LEDs use a lot less energy than previous bulbs but also they produce less heat and they can be targeted more towards the visible range which is what we need. The tungsten halogen lamps for example put out a lot of infrared and that's what results in that heat that we can experience when we're photographing with them. The LEDs will come with different color temperatures as well and so they can be tuned to anything and sometimes you can get some so you can tune them on your own. Most photo lights will aim towards about 4,000 or 5,000 K to get close to natural sunlight and the actual color temperature is less important than your consistency in color temperature so if you have existing lights you might want to match those as well as you can. It's always best to get your whole suite of lights at the same time so they're as consistent as they can be because lights will age over time and their color temperature might change but if you need to match lights you could get a tunable LED lamp for example but it can be a little bit challenging to get accurate. Another option between the lights that you might see is continuous versus flash and so continuous lights means that the light stays on at the same intensity all the time you take your picture and you manually turn on and off the light when you're done essentially and then for a flash it might have a modeling light so you might have a low light on all the time but basically it flashes a bright light during your exposure so that it's timed with the camera capture and you can reduce exposure for the objects but also the light itself can be brighter so that can be helpful if you're working in a more uncontrolled environment you can get those lights to be a little bit brighter so when choosing lights the most important thing to consider is the color rendering index that's allowing you so this is usually abbreviated as CRI and this is really the ability of the light to reproduce color when compared to natural light like the sun and so that's considered the ideal light source and light sources with a high CRI are critical with accurate documentation of color and so just as a shorthand above 90 is usually considered a good match and then below 80 is a poor match and so in the graphic here you can see that the child sees the orange color instead of the red color which is what the apple is supposed to appear like so you won't get visibility of colors with a light with low CRI and you might actually get some weird effects sometimes known as metamerism where things match under one set of lights and then they don't match under another which can be a real frustrating phenomenon in conservation but by choosing something with a high CRI you can get as close to that sort of natural white light as you can to ensure color fidelity so there are accessories to consider when you are getting lighting and so depending on the light system that you purchase it probably has their own proprietary attachments and so these ones are often pro-photo which is a good company and they have a lot of light choosing attachments but obviously this is the only example and it needs to be able to fit on your light and so the examples here are going to be the softbox where they'll talk about a little bit when you get into lighting orientations softboxes are very valuable to get your lighting more diffuse so for three-dimensional objects it's sort of necessary or anything that's relatively shiny I photograph with a softbox for everything it's a really good way to just get the lighting a little bit more diffuse and more even and then there's also barn doors and that allows you to close down the light or direct it in a specific way and I'll show you an example of using that for capturing texture of surfaces and then reflectors can be helpful because it's another way to broaden the amount of light and then also direct it more towards where you want it to go so it's less going around the room more going towards the direction that you want it to go so setting up a documentation space we'll just get into some of this right now again this is just very general you definitely want to be able to control the light so if you're in an open lab area you need to find a way to reduce ambient light so can you block off the space that you're working in or can you turn off the overhead lights for example diffuse lighting is definitely best for almost every type of artifact you might want to be documenting although there's definitely situations where you might want directed light just generally diffuse light is more useful backgrounds are important you know for any type of publication or professional looking photography you want the background to look good certainly but they can also assist you with exposure so a gray background will help you get to that 18 percent gray so it helps the camera decide what a good exposure is so that's one reason why you see a lot of gray in documentation spaces because the camera wants to see 18 percent gray so the closer your surroundings are to that the more I can make good decisions about exposure so there's other reasons that gray can be helpful so on the bottom I just pick in one of my collections artifacts and photograph it with different colored backgrounds and so the middle is that 18 percent gray or maybe a little lighter and then on the left is black and on the right is light and so I want you to look at those a little bit back and forth and see how the contrast of the object itself is changed by the color of the background so with the white background the edges of the object kind of blend in a little bit so anything that might have white edges is going to sort of blur into the background a little bit and likewise the one with the black background the contrast is sort of enhanced and so that might not be a helpful representation of the object or it might be helpful so it depends on what that object is something that is partially transparent might look odd with a black background for example so for just a generic background gray can be a really good choice as for what those backgrounds are made of there's definitely some options there are gray paints available so you can paint your background with a quality paint and that can be a really good option you can buy sort of specific backdrops usually that pull down sort of fabric or paper you can use paper itself you can get gray papers I've used foam core, black foam core and sheet cure there's also gray formica that can be really useful if you're setting up a copy stand for example and getting those of course to neutral gray as you can that's helpful because it helps again with that not only the appearance but getting that right exposure but it's not critical that it be 100% neutral gray although there are those available but definitely avoid colored backgrounds it can be distracting and it can also cause color cast on the object if they have any reflections or if they're like colored in particular something to think about so the stability of the camera itself so this is usually achieved with a tripod or a camera stand so the camera stands would be the higher end option for that but potentially have more flexibility and that tripod is more flexible and probably already available in your institution thinking about the orientation of what you're photographing is it two dimensional or the three dimensional those are different types of photography spaces maybe you need both so you can find a way to make them both work but if you just need 2D for example it can be a little bit easier than 2D and 3D or just 3D so again just some tips for 2D work so that would be like photographing paintings or works on paper that are relatively flat or objects that are relatively small and flat with parallel planes so that means the camera is parallel to the subject as much as is reasonably possible and then usually two or more lights most orientations you're going to want probably two lights one on either side one light is going to be really limiting and you're going to have a lot of challenges with reflections and then getting even throughout the whole field it's really important to have a flexible orientation in order to document things of different sizes and with different characteristics so setting it up so it's flexible can save you a lot of headaches later on if there's something you didn't consider coming in and then think about ways to reduce reflections so reflections are going to come from the windows or the walls or something else that might be in the room so that's again why we talked about things in photo documentation spaces are usually maybe gray or black so that matte, dead black is going to help reduce reflections on the wall that might change the color temperature of your space or might show up in places that you don't want to be if there is something that has reflective surfaces so this is my studio I'm sitting at this table right now talking to you this is my 150 square foot contribution lab at my home in Colorado so you'll notice it's not being gray and it's not ideal one thing that I learned is that don't get started on your project in that space until you're paying with it because now I have art in here I can never, I can't paint because I can't use the artwork to the painting because I don't have another space right now so I can't paint the space until I have another room to sort of move into but another thing I would want to talk about is that I control the lights here I put a blackout curtains on the windows and there's no one else working here so it can be pretty flexible and then the color of the walls is sort of not super critical at the time but I have had cases where I think we glass on them for example and I'll see the reflection of the walls and so if my walls were painted black I wouldn't have that problem and so this is a small space but I've made it to be flexible and so I just want to talk a little bit about this orientation of the copy stand in particular because that's where I will start and so this is my setup which is a copy stand and then this is just a schematic of a copy stand so for 2D materials what copy stand can be really valuable so this is a general schematic of what that looks like so it's used for flat paper or paintings that can be laid down and then small or flat objects and so the camera shoots down the camera is oriented on top of the subject and then this lighting arrangement is for normal light so there's two lights and they're at like a 20 to 25 degree angle from the subject and so the most important thing that makes a copy stand so useful I think in my practice is that the camera and the subjects are parallel to each other because my table is parallel and my camera is parallel and that's what speeds up the photography in general so you can put your objects there, your camera is already in place or you can, I mean it comes up and down sometimes but in general it's a much easier way to photograph flat objects because everything's already in parallel and then the lights are flexible so in this case I can turn off one light and then move one light down so it's at more of a 10 degree angle and you have that rating light orientation and so here in this example I've closed down the barn door so there's like a split of light coming onto the subject and that's how we get that closer to point source that we need for a rating light and I'll just share an example of what that means so on the right is this rating light of this print versus the normal light and so what we're seeing here is really the paper morphology so you can see the paper's not perfectly flat and then also you can see that the impressions from the original printing is there as well and that's information that's not captured in that normal light orientation but the normal light orientation gives us a better view of the image itself so if that's your value for this image then maybe you only need normal light and so for rating light for conservation documentation is really critical often for this example this print was practically washed and flattened so the rating light image was really important to capture that condition but that might not always be the goal of your photography and so for lights on the copy stand there are a lot of options and so the most common would be having just pre-standing photo lights which are on stands that can be moved around as you meet them and so which you've got more sleep on the floor or you can have feeling mounted lights the good example in my studio I showed you they're mounted on a ceiling on a rail and then this example also shows some softboxes so I have softboxes online like I said that can help giving you more diffuse light which is almost always affordable to more directed light there are other options as well and so on the left here this is like a ready-made copy stand that you can buy and has the lights already integrated into the system and so these can be helpful as a one-stop shopping kind of situation but they are very limited in size so if you're photographing anything I would say it's larger than that 16 by 20 that's relatively flat you're not going to be able to document it very well with a ready-made copy stand like this for one the platform is not big enough although you can extend that manually the problem really is you can't get the lights far enough away so having those lights separated can be really valuable and give you more flexibility and orientation and then on the right this example is from cultural heritage imaging for capturing RTI which we won't talk about today so this is just anyway you can get the camera to shoot down and you can photograph onto the floor and that's essentially a copy stand but you can imagine that this setup is going to take a lot longer for you to set up than a copy stand that's already in place and so if time is a consideration then a copy stand can help you quite a bit of time so another way to photograph 2D materials would be with an easel so this is the setup at the Gulf of the States Conservation Lab and in most conservation studios this is what you'll see especially if you're photographing primarily easel paintings and so the easel is on one wall and then you're photographing straight onto that but it's essentially the same orientation so the camera and the subject are parallel the lighting is about 20 to 25 degrees and then adding those soft boxes can be helpful to reduce shadows and give you more to see the lighting and so this diagram is seen from the top so the subject is on the easel, maybe on the wall and then the camera is parallel to that pointed towards the wall that 20 to 25 degree angle can be really helpful to reduce reflections on the surface of objects like varnish paintings or things that are glazed because the light is not bouncing back into the camera so 45 degrees which I think some people think about is the perfect orientation to get even lighting is actually the best way to get reflections from the surface so try to think about that sort of smaller angle with the light sort of a little bit closer to the subject and up to the side to reduce reflection so moving on to 3D material is the easiest way to capture 3D materials on a table and again, for example, from the Buffalo State our conservation documentation lab which in my opinion is one of the most flexible and beautifully designed studios but obviously we don't all have that but this can be set up in any space that's sort of large enough depending on your object and so the idea is you have your camera set up on the tripod or the stand and then your object is on a table and so in order to achieve that glazed backdrop a lot of people use those photo-specific backdrops that can be rolled up and so that's sort of what I'm trying to share with this diagram and so the subject is sort of resting on that and the backdrop is rolled up behind this there is no scene and so you shoot towards the object and then it's on. There's a lot of variables here the object itself could be rotated or it could be put on a turntable to rotate or your camera could be up and shooting down at an angle in order to get more of a perspective shot and then just to see that from another angle would be if you were seeing that view from above to show you where the light could go and so you see that sort of and then diffuse lighting from the soft waxes it's both reading materials is really critical to have the ability to do soft wax on your light even if you don't use it every time you're going to have more variable lighting angles here with three-dimensional objects that depends on how many how much texture it has how three-dimensional it is or what it is you're trying to capture so in general the lights tend to be closer to the camera in order to get that lighting as close on to the front as you can to reduce shadow and so that turntable so putting the object itself on a turntable allows you to move the object and keeping it in the same relative space so that you can capture all sides without having to move the object physically or move your camera and then again that perspective shot is the camera from above the subject and pointed down just to illustrate that seamless background so the idea is that there's no horizon line behind the subject it's just that first create either in this case they're both paper but you could be fabric or a painted plastic this example just shows the setup at the Shakespeare Place Trust which is in the UK and so they have this copy stand and then that's used to collect things that are two-dimensional but they also have this more flexible thing that looks like it can be in someone's workspace where the backdrop can roll down and then probably those same lights are brought in and then the camera shoots through straight on and so I like this illustration I just wanted to talk about the flexibility here so a copy stand can be used as an object table if you have the ability to drop down that in the backdrop for example you can use the same lighting you don't have to have different spaces or different equipment in order to achieve two different things and then you might just consider that your object might need more than one angle to document it completely or depending on what it is you're trying to document this is just an example of a book which has two very specific ways to document it straight down it will give me information about the actual book, the pages if I open the second photograph each page and have a good document of those parts of the book but there's no information at all about the spine or the thickness of the book but taking the camera so if the one on the left is captured with a copy stand and just the camera off and put it on my tripod and I photographed it from above down like a perspective shot then I can capture more information about the spine and its physicality as a book. I want to talk about metadata just briefly to highlight this importance and then some things you might want to think about in order to create accurate documents of what you've done and so the camera will automatically collect some data so the date and the time that you took the photograph as long as your camera has the right date and time those will be captured and then your camera make a model your exposure the resolution, all these things will be automatically captured usually by your camera and recorded in the file property so if you have a software that can read metadata you'll be able to see that in this case this is Adobe Bridge but there's a lot of information that is missed and so I recommend that you add metadata of what you did and so this is just an example of things that I add and so the creator that you write your name in your contact information that can be written right into the file the lighting and the orientation so perhaps the types of lights that you used their orientation so that might be the angle from the subject or just the height from the floor whether or not you use the softbox for example information about the subject that you documented that can help someone else understand the image later on and if you use camera filters so for certain types of photography you might use filters or you might use a polarizing filter for example that's not going to be recorded automatically so you should write that in that you did that and really the goal is to record anything that might help you or another user repeat the setup or understand the image and so for conservation documentation it's always the fore and after so you want those to match as much as possible so you're telling yourself or someone else how to photograph that later and how to set up that scene there are templates available and then I usually add this information into the IPTC section under description which is outlined in the AIC guide to do photography and conservation documentation which I'll talk about later when choosing file formats when choosing file formats for archiving you want to ensure that they have universal accessibility so the idea is to avoid any proprietary files and so for raw files each manufacturer is going to have their own proprietary file and for example this is Canon CR2 Nikon with the NEF and so the one that's created for archiving purposes is it was made by Adobe and it's called digital negative so it's .DNG and it's considered to be more accessible and it is explicitly created to be archival so for long term storage in theory that file will be more accessible you know 10 or 20 years from now likewise for more archival file types so raw files are helpful because they retain a lot more information that came out of the camera but for archiving you probably want to say that it's something that can be readable by more users so that would be a test for image files and then .DNG and then .PDS for maybe documents that might include images for example so .JPEG is really good for sharing but the images are compressed so it's not archival format if you're trying to retain as much information as possible so the tip would be the unarchived most readable file created and then the raw file which is that digital negative retains more information for specialized users if they want to use that later on workflows are really valuable because they provide consistency not only between again your future self but you know within a group that might be working together and so the typical elements of a workflow are going to be the setup of the documentation space and the lighting the camera settings so that would be the white balance your ISO in your exposure mode all the capture settings this is going to change depending on what it is exactly you're photographing but you know f-stop shutter speed shutter speed all these things that you're going to think about every time you take a picture and how you make those decisions whether you're shooting to that 200 value on the color checker or how your white balance is for example and then post processing this could be very complicated post processing are very straightforward or simple post processing and then file naming it's important to have a system in place for file naming especially if you're embarking on a project because you don't want to end up with you know just the automatic sequence for example that has no meaning or you know photo one, photo two, photo three that's not going to be valuable in a month from now when you can't remember what what are you doing so setting up the file name and photo call in the workflow or ahead of time is really valuable and then how those files will be stored so again local storage of files can be challenging because you don't have access as far as the building for example or if that computer is corrupted then you lose all that work that you've done and so I included some examples of workflows in the resources document that you can download and so there's one that was recently published by the Library of Congress which is very very specific it's specific to their equipment as well but it can be really helpful as like a template for setting up your own and then of course the AIC guide conservation documentation includes examples of workflows as well even though they might be a little out of date they still have all the sort of steps that you need to consider and then you know again this is just an overview so I just want to talk about some common issues that I see and I can get some feedback from you and we'll have some time for questions and so if one of your issues is call your accuracy or exposure which I believe are tied to be fixed with the same tool you know definitely use that imaging target inside your image including every image even if you cross it out later if you're really struggling with that as well you can add color profiles and that can be made using that X-ray passport I showed in the beginning and you can learn about that on X-ray's website it's very straightforward to do and then ensure that your lights are high CRI so if you're not sure try to just figure out the model and the manufacturing you should be able to look that up very quickly if you're purchasing new lamps make sure again aiming for 95 as a good number but definitely above 90 you'll never get good color accuracy with so low CRI lamps and then so if your problem is uneven lighting and shadows try to allow for flexibility in where your lights can be and where your camera can be and so that means maybe the lights can move up and down for example make different angles or move further out away from the subject this is really valuable if you have reflective surfaces as well because you're essentially just trying to move the reflection from that surface off the object itself so it doesn't go back into the camera if you're really limited in your lighting angles especially or if you have very reflective surfaces polarizers can be really helpful so that's essentially a filter that goes on your camera and then that goes over your lamp that allows you to control the way the light comes out of the lamp and the way it goes into your camera so you can reduce reflections that way you have a little bit of a tradeoff with the image quality because it does increase saturation a little bit so for conservation documentation it can be a little challenging if you have something that's oversized consider that you might need more than one image to document that or more than one lamp or more than two lamps especially in order to get the lighting even it almost always helps to move the lights further away from the subject and so if you're having issues with file naming establish a protocol and process your images as soon as possible like while you're working can be really helpful because you don't forget the information if you document everything and do all the file naming and processing either that day or during that session then you've captured as much as you can and so we have a poll now so we can have time for questions but I wanted to know if you guys could give me some feedback about your biggest challenges and collections maybe we can talk about this poll after you have a few minutes to do it so time looks like it's a clear winner but institution equipment is right behind there in training so just some final thoughts from me if you are setting up a studio for documentation or setting up a project definitely prioritize your purchase though so there are things basic needs and then there are things that are nice to have the basic needs are camera, lighting and target idle there's obviously a lot more money that can be spent you can get a lot more tools you can get more training as well but those are the basics that you need and so if you can place out purchases over time for example it's a very low cost item but the AIC guide to digital photography and conservation documentation is extremely valuable so if you don't purchase anything to improve your setup just getting this book and having it available to you as a reference can be very helpful and so this is the third edition that you can get as a PDF from AIC's website which was updated fairly recently obviously with digital things get out of date well too quickly but the core concepts are photography and documentation of collections is really well articulated in this book so if you want to learn more information about what I've talked about or any of these specific, any photography subjects you can learn it in this book or it can point you towards more resources and then just some suppliers that I talked about I got a lot of my photo equipment from V&H Photo which is out of New York City and then for targets X-Rite AIC we used to sell the target to AIC and they're not available up there anymore so Rob and Meyer's imaging and then image science is another option so there's as well especially the higher end targets for the federal requirements and then this is my contact information and I hope you had time to download that handout I gave you about some resources and there's time for questions now that hopefully you guys have been up to on the chat thanks so much Jennifer that was a lot of great information I know someone earlier in the chat was basically saying this is like a whole job unto itself and I was like agreed like just doing collection photography is a really separate skill set that I've always been fascinated with and it's really interesting to kind of hear what kind of what information you had to relay so I'm going to let people kind of fill out the chat a little bit I have some questions so we can go through and we have about 15 minutes to do that but I wanted to start off with asking kind of a general question which was when it comes to that basic photo set up you showed or you talked about like lights background stuff how much do you think that would cost just generally like a ballpark to get something set up within your institution like with a copy stand kind of thing or yeah like copy stand or even just like we get the background and the lights and just if you wanted something that let's say you're working at a midsize institution and someone asked you hey we want to set you up something but you had to give them like a ballpark figure that should it cost I mean I'd say you could do a lot with like $2,000 it could be definitely more than that and possibly less depending you know on the size and if you had like an in-house like fabricator one of the best things about my setting up my practice is that my dad is a carpenter so he set up my copy stand set up which I bought in components and so I got a copy stand call on that specific to the wall and then I got a table that just a table and then the lights I got separately as well so it wasn't like a one-stop shopping at all but because I had someone who was able to help me install those things I was able to do that and not everyone has that ability so I'd say if you had some fabrication out then you can keep costs down a little bit and probably the most expensive thing you will buy is the camera depending on what kind of resolution you're looking for the copy stand and in my practice it makes money so it saves time it costs me that amount of money to build it but it saves so much of my time that I have more time to do things that make money, does that make sense? Oh totally, no I understand sometimes you have to like front load it almost knowing that eventually this will kind of pay for itself but that totally we did have a question actually real quick before we change subjects it says someone has just posted in the chat if you're working on a budget it might be worth searching places like Craiglist for a used copy stand this person got lucky and bought an excellent one for about 100 bucks 10 years, 10 years ago so I bet you might have stuff like that as well so one question we had posted in there I'll go ahead well I also think about what you might already have for example if you're doing a copy stand and you have the column but you don't have a table like maybe your flat file can be the table for example something like that and I got my flat file on Craiglist so eBay I got I forgot lots of equipment on eBay as well yeah now people are trading stories on how they've built copy stands so it's kind of fun to kind of see how people kind of cobble together stuff which is what you always end up doing so someone says it has been suggested in my institution that for works on paper we can use an overhead scanner as opposed to photography any helpful thoughts on this that I can take back to other non-collection stuff so it can open a scanner like a book scanner situation yeah that's the feeling yeah that can work fine and essentially in that orientation the scanner is like a scanning back on an older file camera and so it can collect information that you need and probably with all to the good pixel evolution you know with scanners I'm always thinking about contact with the subject so it doesn't sound like this is a problem with that if it's like mounted overhead for example if it's something that you already have in place there may be that that can be valuable but it's going to be limited on where that can go so that scanner can only live like that you can't take it off and take a different orientation image for example the resolution may be a challenge as well but that should be information that's available to you so you can pair that resolution to what you might be able to get with a new camera and maybe use that as an example of whether it would be good to get a new camera or whether that's sufficient or not for the image someone this is an interesting question I bet a bunch of people have run into it says our DSLR is older and only 3MP is it acceptable to use an iPhone 8 with 12MP fixed aperture for informational images and condition report surveys so I bet that happens to a lot of people that they may have invested in a camera a bunch of years ago and now they do a true good camera but sometimes they might be so what are your thoughts on that? Yeah I think that it's true that our phones are probably going to have better imaging capabilities a lot of the older cameras that might be around so again you can compare the pixel resolution and then the results as well you might have some image distortion that happens with the iPhone pictures if that's not critical then it probably is better to use it with a phone and then you actually have more flexibility because you can hold it overhead I think that that also could be an argument that can be taken to the institution that more investment is needed in this camera because it's so old that my phone is better than it and you know again depending on the use of that image the iPhone picture is often enough. Yeah I think sometimes for a basic photo I know sometimes when I because I'm in another life I was a contract registrar who would travel places to go do condition reporting and for basic photos I have a good camera but there's been times when I've had it only for a basic condition so I think sometimes it just depends on what you kind of have access to Yeah and if it's like this is what this object looks like here's a picture of it you know it's just an email for example that can be very useful Exactly Someone's asking for any advice for the best photography when it comes to textile objects such as clothing. Do you have any like tips for doing that kind of photographing? I mean I treat textile sort of like it works on paper so shooting from above you know treating those as subjects and so the size can be a real challenge and I've had some success with like a plant table setup for like large tapestries for example but the plant tables can be a real challenge to get everything to the level I guess if there's a specific question like whether it's about a exposure or orientation or handling then I can answer that but I'm not sure if that was enough information I think that's I've always heard of slant boards as well but you're right they can be a little problematic you know what I mean when dealing with them so she said did I hear correctly that targets are no longer sold through AIC I'm only finding the large color checker passport. Yeah AIC those ones have been discontinued they were sold by Rob Meyers for a while but I think it was just a challenge to make it economically feasible so I haven't tried out the new one that he's launched which is not at the AIC website it's at Rob Meyers website which is on the screen the large color checker passport they're kind of two things X-ray cells they bought great high makes up so they sell all those color checkers so you can get a large one that's about 8.5 by 11 you can get really big ones but the passport is something that's like rectangular and it's about 4 by 5 and it folds up and that is about $100 and I have one of those that you can use it for profiling as well I buy that from B&H which is a photo supply company it's made for photographers not through AIC Someone goes on to ask do you recommend white balancing before taking the image or can you do it post-processing I'm wondering if there is a difference in accuracy or efficiency with one or the other I think it's more efficient to set the white balance before you capture so that you don't have to make adjustments that just reduces the steps for example you don't have to white balance but there's not really a difference in quality post-processing white balance as long as you have that color checker in there and it has enough pixels in order to white balance process it's just another step that you have to do that you could avoid if you had done it ahead of time Someone also recommended that you do a whole series of webinars C to C care going for a depth with everything so I would say that's a lot to go in depth into exactly I was going to say for everyone on the evaluation link that you'll see on the left hand side of the screen when you complete that which we always appreciate that if you have suggestions for other webinars for C to C care to do feel free to put ideas like that in there talking about other training someone had posted early on where would one look for in-person training you know obviously there's all sorts of fun travel restrictions we're all dealing with right now but kind of were there other places that did in-person training that you had heard about or was it mainly online or is it stuff you just kind of learned during your career? I don't know of any in-person things that are available all the time I know there are workshops given like Dan Cushall and JJ Chen have given them that best flow of institutions and give them and I know there's some other questions who do that as needed and fun meetings we've done though but I think it's something that's really lacking is more training in this subject as for where I learned it I would say definitely graduate school training under Dan Cushall really is part of my life in a lot of ways but I've also kept up that in-person imaging in my practice I worked for a Ph.D. for a long time and worked on some targets for you visible for us and so it just kind of became a part of my life over time and something that I really enjoy doing and you know I consider important to my conservation career and documentation is something that I value highly. Yeah, I think it's one of those things that the folks I've known who are really into it were really good at it but they kind of learned kind of like what you were talking about they either found like kind of I guess a mentor person who did it or if they happened to hear about a workshop they ran and kind of learned as much as they possibly could. Another question people are asking about is a little bit about 3D objects someone's talking about how the biggest issue they have is high gloss dark colored 3D objects and someone else mentions imaging 3D objects are there any pit bulls or settings to keep in mind when shooting them? Do you have any thoughts on 3D objects in general? Yeah, so high gloss black objects that sounds like a nightmare you know those are certainly challenging so any sort of limitations you already have in your setup are going to be amplified by that because it's going to reflect back at the camera so if you can't control external lighting for example that's going to cause more reflections so the first thing I would do is make sure that the only reflections you have to deal with are the actual lights you need to document it and then you know consider moving those lights and maybe a non-traditional orientation to reduce reflections perhaps using a polarizer in order to reduce reflections on the surface and then that will be a case where maybe you don't want a softbox because you're just making the reflection bigger I know I talked about softboxes being really useful but that would be one example but maybe it's not that useful but you could also consider just that part of what you're documenting is the fact that it's reflective so you can accept some reflections in the image as long as it's not hearing information that you need and then the other question was about ISO and settings right? Yes and so white balance is going to be dependent on your light source so the white balance for 3D objects is going to be sort of the same as for 2D you want to have that target in the image or the white balance set ahead of time because the white balance is going to be tied to the light source and then for exposure the aperture is the most critical component for 3D objects and so I talked about f8 and f11 being the center of the lens so they're the sharpest for something that has a lot of dimension from front to back as you're photographing it you might want to change the aperture so that you basically can get more in focus and so f16 for example might have more focus but if your lens only goes to f22 closing it all the way down like that might not be that helpful because you might have a trade-off with flaring so for 3D objects sometimes you can't get the whole thing in focus and you need to get the whole thing in focus sometimes the best solution is to take multiple pictures and then in post-glap are saying you blend those together so that all the things can be in focus it's called focusing thank you appreciate it well it is almost 330 shockingly enough so I'm going to go ahead and say close out this webinar for now we are going to try to grab the chat because that has been interesting for some people to kind of go through plus if you look over on the side of the links area you'll see the resources the evaluation link and I uploaded the evaluation slides while you were presenting so if anyone wants to grab those now you can again this webinar was recorded so we will be posting that plus all the other resources slides and everything else on the ConnectingToCollections.org website probably by early next week at the latest I want to say a huge thank you to Jennifer for taking some time today this is a lot of information and a lot of information I think a lot of people are grateful for again because it's you learn it when you can get access to it so we really appreciate it and also thanks to FAAIC IMLS for supporting this program and Learning Times for doing the production Jennifer do you have anything to add for the rest of today? I don't think so if there are more questions in the chat that didn't get answered I'm happy to answer those and send them out great thank you yeah I'm going to grab like I said we'll grab the chat transcript and I can send it to you to take a look at as well if you see anything because it has everyone's names well thanks again everyone we will be back in October for both the course and also for the free webinar that are happening so please keep an eye on all of our fun websites social media platforms for announcements on that and hope everyone stays safe and healthy thanks again