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NDF 2016 Photographing a Collection - From Galleries to Factories by Dave Sanderson
- 1. Photographing a Collection From Galleries to Factories
- 2. Dave Sanderson – Project Leader Collection Imaging aucklandmuseum.com/collections @thebiglankyape dsanderson@aucklandmuseum.com
- 3. Auckland War Memorial Museum - AWMM
- 4. How is it funded? ‘We’ve been saving!’ The museum’s been working towards these projects for years and saving for approx. 10 years All Collections Readiness projects are Capital Funded – realising assets at the end of each project Other capital projects are happening – building work and galleries
- 5. Collections Hub (before – July 2015)
- 6. Collections Hub (before – July 2015)
- 7. Collections Hub (now – Oct 2016)
- 9. So you’ve got a space – now what?
- 10. WWI Collections Collection Cataloguing Pacific Collection Access Collection Imaging Collections Readiness
- 11. Pacific Collection Access Project Launch
- 12. Pacific Images
- 13. Pacific Images
- 14. Pacific Images
- 15. What don’t we do?
- 16. We don’t do… Marketing & events images: External contractors & marketing staff Conservation imaging: Conservation staff BAU collection photos: Collection Managers Online content: Digital content team & various Pictorial and Documentary collections: External contractors and collections staff (scanning)
- 17. What do we do?
- 18. BK+ Imaging System for Macro and Micro work
- 19. 5x 10x 20x 50x
- 21. Drivers for Collection Imaging Pacific Collection Access Project Collection Cataloguing Project Documentary Heritage (Larger Artworks) Collections Backlog Logistical Demands Programmed Work
- 22. How do we do it?
- 23. Drivers for Collection Imaging The 90% Rule
- 24. Staffing for Collection Imaging 3 photographers (increasing soon) All from outside of the sector (so far) All with good commercial studio experience (so far) All come from a ‘time is money’ background Rights Specialist (very much a museum background!)
- 25. The Studio
- 26. Studio Research Smithsonian Rapid Capture Digitisation Numerous sector studios in New Zealand Commercial rental studios My old scanning ‘factory’ at Archives New Zealand Two large ‘department stores’ in New Zealand
- 27. Equipment – good but not the very best (for good reasons!)
- 29. Workflow as designed Naming, exposure and colour accurate at time of capture performed tethered via laptop Files arrive straight on processing PC passing straight through laptop which acts only as camera operational tool, not storage
- 30. Workflow as in operation Naming, exposure and colour accurate at time of capture performed tethered via laptop Files arrive onto laptop, then moving later through to processing PC
- 31. Tethered software EOS Utility – Naming menu too deep within app DSLR Remote Pro – Chosen app, but image previews not good across network Capture One - Unstable camera connection within IT environment Lightroom – Naming menu too deep within app
- 32. Working with Collections staff Assess each job at the beginning – Curators & Collection Managers Shoot sample images and request review Once agreed – shoot the whole collection Working with Collections Care closely Occasional ‘photographer moment’ – an extra shot slips in
- 33. Naming schema Unique name for each file – ‘uniqueID_001, _002 etc. Filename cross checked several times through end- to-end process Named at point of capture File name directly relates to each object (slightly jealous of the Smithsonian’s barcoding system!)
- 34. Processing No retouching at all (digital preservation) Basic metadata tags added RAW DNG JPEG TIFF Archive CMS Internet WIZARDRY (DCP)
- 35. Disclaimer: Our IT guys are awesome… ENTER: DAMS
- 37. Pre-DAMS state RAW DNG JPEG TIFF WIZARDRY (DCP) Archive CMS Internet File servers EXTRA WIZARDRY! (Several scripts & processes)
- 39. Long term digital guardianship has been front of mind since day #1 Digitisation done ‘safely’ New media for the museum created ‘wisely’ Born digital collecting Digital Preservation
- 40. Collections are ‘Open by Default’ Rights Specialist – researching rights holders Cultural Permissions policies – Māori and Pacific Open GLAM
- 41. All sounds wonderful Dave… Surely something has gone wrong?
- 42. Equipment issues
- 43. Land Vertebrate Study Skins Logistics wins…
- 48. Small collections of objects Logistics losses…
- 49. Victims of our own work… Everyone wants their photos done! (but we can’t do them!)
- 50. Wins?
- 51. 50,000 images + 15,000 objects +
- 56. Grey areas?
Editor's Notes
- Placeholder front image
- Intro to sections of talk: Context of Auckland, the museum and its people Discuss collections being more than just war Strategic context Collections Readiness The way the project is designed DAMS and digital preservation Issues, grey areas and some wins Q&A
- Auckland War Memorial Museum sitting high over looking Auckland and its harbour Important to note that it’s not purely a museum about war – the collections span Human History, Natural Sciences and Documentary Heritage (including manuscripts, pictorial collections, artwork, a research library and the museum’s own archive for instance) Internationally significant Māori and Pacific collections
- Funding is all from capital investment draw down The museum’s been saving for these projects for around a decade Digitised collections are a long term asset by the end of the project
- What we now know as the Collections Hub main office area in its former life as the Coast gallery.
- What is now the imaging studio in its former life as the Oceans gallery. The sharks have since been put into storage or have been hung behind my desk in the public space just over the wall. All I hear each day is “ooooh! Shark!” which I’m both growing to love and loath in equal measure.
- View of the Collection Hub now as an office space and collections area. It’s home to between 15 and 25 people at any one time depending on the stage of the projects.
- And a view of the imaging studio as it is now. More on this later.
- So now we’ve closed some galleries, what do you plan on doing with them?
- The space is home to four projects: WWI collections project which has run for 18 months with two technicians. One month to go and has been focussed on delivering collections ahead of our first two new galleries opening, both of which are related to WWI. Collection cataloguing covers all three collection areas (Human History, Natural Sciences and Documentary Heritage), two thirds of which sit within our space. They make the data in the databases. Pacific Collection Access Project (PCAP) follows on the heals of Te Awe in the sense that there’s cataloguing, conservation, repacking and rehousing and my project does the photography this time around. The museum’s especially proud of this project as we’re breaking new ground by engaging with the 13 island nations whose collections are identified and are cataloguing alongside them, working with community knowledge holders to better our cumulative understanding of the Pacific objects. It’s genuine outreach at work. And lastly, our project, the Collection Imaging project.
- The hub is a deeply spiritual place to work at times alongside great colleagues. This image is of the PCAP launch where many of the island community members came to be reunited with their collections.
- A Cook Island fan, one of the images taken as part of the work for the PCAP project
- A Cook Island ceremonial adze, one of the images taken as part of the work for the PCAP project
- Cook Island ceremonial adzes, both images taken as part of the work for the PCAP project
- So there has to be a line? What don’t we do as photographers in a museum.
- Outlining the work we don’t do within the museum. Out of scope imaging work essentially.
- So what’s in scope – what do we do?
- A slight side journey into the world of micro imaging. The Collection Imaging project is responsible for the ongoing work on imaging our small type specimens from the Natural Sciences collections. It’s been happening for some years now but as we draw close to the end of the specimens we have gotten to the very small items so the project invested in a BK+ Imaging system. We did so after bad experiences with proprietary systems and wanted something modular that we could upgrade and troubleshoot ourselves. Made by a gent who we lovingly refer to as a bit of a mad scientist in Virginia, the gear is great and we’re really loving the work is can produce.
- Images from the first week of testing, being able to show 5x, 10x, 20x and 50x life-size views of very small insects.
- This shot shows an image created from over 1500 slices/images compiled together to make the end results. The insect body is a little over 1mm in length and the end result image is over 10,000pixels on the long edge.
- So the drivers for the main imaging project can be neatly summed up into two logical groups. The first is in reaction to the PCAP and Cataloguing projects where we work on small batches of objects at any one time. The workflow is viewed as more of a whole, where objects come from storage, are catalogued, cleaned and repaired as needed, then photographed by us. We’re part of a bigger production line, so our imaging studio suffers, but overall the efficient way to work for these collections wins out as a bigger picture. The other two areas are self sufficient. We’re embarking on an FTE shooting artworks, and their work is stand alone and free of other pressures. The collections backlog (items catalogued but not imaged) is significant and forms whole large collections to be imaged at once.
- So that’s why we do it, how do we do it?
- I formulated the idea of the 90% rule. On one extreme you get the low grade images every museum has, on the other you get the extreme high art auction house catalogue images. I theorised that you could achieve 90% of the high end images quickly, purely by having the right systems and right staff. I also run the team on the stolen mantra ‘Everything is important’ – (Singer vehicle designs, California) This is not to say the project is a perfectionist effort, but that one of the important things is the balance between image quality and throughput. There’s never any ‘that will do’
- Staffing reasoning for the imaging project
- The studio was designed to operate fully scalable and flexibly. It has to cater for objects from fractions of millimetres to many meters in size, of all materials and shapes. We have done this without using cheap and flimsy equipment and decided to go for industrial quality gear, both for safety and also for complete flexibility of setups.
- Areas of research for the studio
- We didn’t buy Medium format cameras due to their expense and unreliability within corporate IT networks. We didn’t buy flash packs and heads due to their expense, so instead went for Canon 5Ds based systems and Broncolor monoblock heads. We did buy Broncolor for their reliability and serviceability. Accuracy also played a big role.
- We shoot everything tethered to laptops for accuracy, control and flexibility. It’s much easier to maintain standardised shots when working tethered and allows for all of the quality to be embedded upfront as opposed to being addressed down stream in the workflow and requiring reshoots.
- The digital workflow was designed to allow the cameras to write files directly from cameras to the photographer’s PCs in the second room onto an SSD, used as a watch folder for Lightroom catalogues. The laptop was due to simply act as an operational tool for the camera and never see the data itself.
- It doesn’t quite work that way. Due to the software we’re using if we pass data straight through we lose accurate image previews without waiting for each image. So we write to laptop and transfer later to the PCs for processing.
- We tried lots of software for tethering, but these are the main four. Details of issues within slide, but our preferred app, DSLR Remote Pro has issues with image previews across the network which is the reason for the difference in approach mentioned in the previous two slides.
- Our general workflow for working with collection staff on each collection group.
- Notes on the naming schemas we use for the files as we write them
- Diagram of how we process files out into the wider system
- We’re implementing DAMS currently. Big shout out to our IT dept. and their amazing support. We’re also very proud to be using Piction, the principal sponsor of the MCN2016 conference.
- Identifying that our current archive is in fact some well organised servers that many people can see and access. (Not all have write access). Not actually that much of an archive in itself.
- Also identifying that currently there is some magic that happens as JPEGs get written and attached to the CMS (in this case Vernon). This is a series of scripts people run, so good but not actually automated and still labour intensive.
- Diagram showing the current proposed workflow post-DAMS implementation. Here we’ve moved to Piction doing a lot of the heavy lifting for us and reliance on its own in-built automation. We’re also looking into using it to provide all images for the web too assisting the DCP in its current role.
- The implementation of DAMS is beginning to require the museum to ask some fairly large questions about digital preservation. For the Collection Imaging project, this has been front of mind since before the first click of the shutters. All files are intended to be as software and platform agnostic as possible. All files receive no Photoshop or significant editing (simply addition of some metadata tags) as an aid to long term preservation. This is in turn bringing us toward the concept of the museum conducting digitisation ‘safely’ and as we roll this thinking out to the wider museum it’s beginning to take us toward creating all new media and assets wisely. The museum is also already in the process of born-digital collecting.
- We then add this to the museum’s approach to open access where our collections are open by default. Wherever possible we license material via the CC BY license, gradually working down through the Creative Commons licenses to an ‘All Rights Reserved’ statement. We’re also happy to say we have two Cultural Permissions policies. Our Māori policy has been in place and running well for a few years and our Pacific policy is almost fully signed off and we’re working to it in practice already.
- So this story so far is all very positive, what issues have you had?
- Equipment issues: Thankfully they’ve been few and far between, but they have happened. Our wonderful Broncolor lights, by being the first batch delivered started to suffering power accuracy issues when the power was down low. Good support means they were all checked and swapped for new tubes and they’ve been flawless ever since. Our bright orange USB3 cables we use for tethering (manufacturer name withheld) are constantly failing. Given their cost and the manufacturer’s speciality, this is disappointing. Unfortunately as we can get no other 5m cables within New Zealand we have to keep buying them as disposable items. And the wifi app for the Broncolor lights which we use via iPads constantly struggles with connections. The iPad, app and lights work flawlessly outside the building, so despite switching off lots of wifi access points, the number of alarms, sensors and wifi hotspots within a museum seems to be an issue for this technology.
- One of our logistical wins was the Land Vertebrate Study Skins – a collection of 5500 birds. This was big bulk collection, standardised and worked really well for us.
- Shot of the underneath of the bird illustrating standard shots we took
- Shot of the back of the bird illustrating standard shots we took
- Shot of the tag on the bird illustrating standard shots we took
- Shot of the underneath complete with colour chart and scale and accession number visible of the bird illustrating standard shots we took
- As a counter point, an example of some of the logistical losses we’ve had are small collections like these Tsuba (the ornamental cuff/guard that goes between the handle and blade on Japanese swords). This collection although beautiful, was small so we never gained the efficiencies of a large collection set. These smaller collections coming from the responsive cataloguing projects within the hub are an inefficient source of work for the imaging team, but when you view the end to end progress of the collection group through the whole Collection Hub, we’re currently doing it in a relatively efficient way for the museum overall.
- And we’re also victims of our own work – everyone wants their shots taken, from special gallery and marketing requests through to the staff intranet photos and even the LinkedIn profiles. Unfortunately, outside our scope.
- So some of the wins we’ve seen?
- In the first 11 months on the equivalent of around 2.5 photographers, we’ve passed 50,000 images of 15,000 collection objects. With the workflow, the design of the process and outcome and quality we’re shooting to we’re really proud of this.
- When I see images like this I feel a big sense of achievement. Remembering these images are not Photoshopped and are of different sized eggs (even including Moa eggs), the consistency of lighting and quality so you can visualise them in grids and digital displays like this speaks volumes for the quality control and standards our team is meeting.
- We also got into doing science when we photographed this Hummingbird. When you rotate it only a few degrees the red feathers do not reflect light back properly and you see black feathers. This turns out to be structural to the feathers and down to how they reflect only certain wavelengths of light at very small viewing angles.
- We saw this phenomena on several birds including this Peacock. This means we had to do a little research alongside our Curator and Collection Manager (which resulted in some blogging) into how to work with these birds. We essentially had to get quite creative with the lighting to actually show the feathers the way they appear.
- Image showing the lighting we used to illuminate the reflective feathers on the peacock
- What grey areas have there been?
- Ed Hillary’s Order of the British Empire medal – Sir Edmund Hilary was the New Zealander who, along with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first people in the world to conquer Mt Everest. Auckland Museum is home to the Hilary archive. The brief was given to us by the design agency responsible for the interactive. It was short and simple. Reproduce the Apple Watch images but with WWI medals. We used no retouching at all for these images.
- Images of new gallery interactive in our first Future Museum gallery ‘Pou Maumahara’. The interactive draws heavily on high end images of WWI medals the Collection Imaging project delivered.
- Image of the interior of our new gallery Pou Maumahara
- Introduction to some of the ‘photographer’s fave’ images
- Image of necklace
- Image of necklace. Drawing emphasis to the highly reflective Paua shells and the lighting skill required to shoot such an image.
- Image of the Huia, a New Zealand native bird hunted to extinction in the 1910-1920’s. Very symbolic bird for New Zealand and a real privilege to shoot.
- The huia tail feathers: the birds were hunted to extinction specifically for their tail feathers, often worn as a feather in the cap of royalty and the wealthy
- Close up image of feathers from a Tui, another New Zealand native bird infamous for its unique song derived from having two voice boxes.
- A 2.5x life size shot using a Canon MP-E 65 1-5x macro lens of hummingbird feathers. There’s no Photoshop in this image and it was hand held. The image is proving so popular we’re considering selling limited edition prints as fundraising prizes.
- A shot of a Susan Holmes dress, an NZ fashion designer. The image sits alongside shots of photographer Jen working on the dress and a scene of the studio setup. We went a little higher end with the imaging than normal as the images were being used for multiple purposes.
- Q&A session for the audience asking me questions.