Category: Photography

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Image Quality Museums Photography VRC

Photographing in the Field Workshop

Photographing in the Field Workshop
Wednesday, May 10, 12:00-1pm CWAC Rm 257
Hosted by the Visual Resources Center
Will you be going on a research trip this summer and could use some photography tips and tricks? This workshop will discuss basic camera controls and techniques for taking pictures in museums, archives, and architectural sites. We will also discuss some simple Photoshop techniques used to improve photographs taken in difficult situations. Come with questions and your camera! Sandwiches will be provided after the workshop. RSVP to wgaylord@uchicago.edu.

Image by © Babak Tafreshi/National Geographic Creative/Corbis

 

Categories
Images on the Web Museums Photography

Art Institute of Chicago Announces New Alfred Stieglitz Collection Website

The Department of Photography announced this week a new website focused on the museum’s Alfred Stieglitz photography collection. The interactive collection features high-quality reproductions of all 244 photographs in the collection gifted by his widow, Goergia O’Keefe in 1949. The majority of prints are by Stieglitz himself, but also by Ansel Adam, Julia Margaret Cameran, Paul Strand, Edward Steichen, and many others in his circle. Furthermore, the site highlights new conservation analysis, 900 images, scholarly essays, and downloadable files. Explore the site at media.artic.edu/stieglitz

Categories
Image Quality Photography VRC

Keystoning Correction in Photoshop

Keystoning occurs when the subject is not parallel with the camera lense. For example, if the camera lense is closer to the bottom of the building, it will appear much larger than the top of the building in the photograph.

 

1. Double the size of the canvas. Image > Canvas Size
2. Select the entire image area.
3. Edit > Transform > Skew
To rectify right angles and retain proportions do not pull top corner fully out, but only halfway out, and then pull other corner halfway in, creating a fulcrum upon the midpoint of the line.

It may help to view the image with a grid. View > Show > Grid
4. Now crop out the superfluous two corners.

Categories
Images on the Web Innovative Technology Islamic Medieval Photography VRC

Qantara

Comprising a website, a traveling exhibition, and book, Qantara is a very rich and interesting resource for studying the cultural heritage of the Mediterranean from Late Antiquity to the 18th century. The website contains over 1500 entries from Western Europe, Byzantium, and Islamic regions that include objects, sites, and monuments. The material can be searched using various intersections such as materials, subjects, or historical period. Each entry has descriptive metadata (size, media, discovery and repository information), a short descriptive essay, and a bibliography.

There are repositories and cultural heritage institutions from nine countries involved in Qantara, and the information has been reviewed by over 200 experts including curators, historians, and researchers.

Categories
Architecture Image Quality Luna Medieval Photography

French Cathedrals in the Lantern Slide Collection

The Visual Resources Center recently added a beautiful group of French medieval cathedrals to the publicly available Lantern Slide Collection. These images are some of the finest examples of large format architectural photography in the collection. We continue to add images to the Luna collection on a regular basis, so check back in to see what’s new!

Categories
Images on the Web Luna Photography VRC

The Robert Sengstacke Photography Archive Now Available in LUNA

The VRC is excited to announce its new publicly available LUNA collection, Images of Black Chicago: The Robert Sengstacke Photography Archive.  Born in Chicago on May 29, 1943, Robert “Bobby” Sengstacke is one of the city’s most prolific documentary photographers who is best known for capturing the African American experience.  Having grown up in the newspaper business (he is the grand-nephew of Robert Sengstacke Abbott, founder of the Chicago Defender), Sengstacke was able to learn from established African American photographers at a young age and had unique access to important events and people.  With the help of Art History Professor Rebecca Zorach, the VRC has scanned over 3,000 negatives featuring the artistic community and street life of Chicago’s South Side in the late 1960’s. To obtain high resolution images and permission contact Robert A. Sengstacke (robert.sengstacke@gmail.com or 773-744-7487).

Categories
Images on the Web Museums Photography

Object:Photo

 

The Museum of Modern Art recently launched Object:Photo, an amazing website focused on the Thomas Walther Collection. Composed of 341 photographs, the Walther Collection entered the museum in 2001. In 2010, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gave the museum a substantial grant to research and preserve the photographs. The website is a direct result of this four-year research project. In the words of Glenn D. Lowry, the Museum of Modern Art’s director, the website “is unprecedented in its functionality, providing virtual access to the objects in exceptional depth, along with wide-ranging scholarship on the photographs’ historical context and significance.”

In addition to scans of the photographs themselves, there are scholarly essays, a section on the scientific analysis of the photographs, and most interestingly, a section called “Visualizations,” that presents interactive maps and timelines allowing viewers to easily connect photographers, see where they worked and exhibited, who they interacted with, and even compare photographs by attribute, subject, or style.

Categories
Image Quality Photography Powerpoint Tech Support VRC

Photoshop Actions

Are you spending too much time with repetitive tasks in Photoshop? Photoshop actions allows you to record a process and save that information as an action which you can then use for other tasks down the road. Not only that, you can edit actions after the fact and customize them to suit your needs.

While you can make an unlimited amount of actions, including color correction, below is an example of how to resize images ideal for Powerpoint. Take some time to plan the steps of the actions before recording.

1. Select “New Action” from the bottom right of the Actions window. Title the action and click “Record.”

 

2. To resize the image, go to the Image menu and select Image Size. Change the resolution to 150dpi.

 

3. Now SAVE AS a JPEG to a specific location on your computer.

4. Finally, click the “Stop” button at the bottom left of the Actions window. You can now use this action on individual images by pressing the “Play” button or Batch Process an entire folder.

 

 

 

Categories
Images on the Web Museums News Photography VRC

The Robert Frank Collection Online at the National Gallery of Art

The Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art is the largest repository of materials related to renowned photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank. Spanning Frank’s career from 1937 to 2005, the collection includes vintage and later prints, contact sheets, work prints, negatives, three bound books of original photographs, technical material, and various papers, books, and recordings.

For a complete account of photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection, see Robert Frank photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection. The spreadsheet lists subjects photographed by Frank, in chronological order, along with the corresponding number of photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection and the accession number of each object.

Categories
Image Quality Photography Software VRC

Photoshop: Cutting Out the Background

Have you ever wanted to eliminate the distracting background from an object photographed on-site?  Cutting out the background can be very easy or a bit challenging, depending on how complex the image is. The magic wand tool can be a very effective tool when your background is simple in nature.

Step-by-step:

1. Select the magic wand tool from the toolbar.

2. Click on the area you want to sample. The magic wand will outline the area with flashing dotted lines.

3. Initially, the magic wand may only pick up some of the background. Hold the Shift key  and continue clicking on the areas to add to the selection until the object is isolated.

4. Use the Exposure tool to adjust the background to white or black, pulling it to the far right for white or far left for black.

5. You may need to use the clone tool or paintbrush to clean-up areas that the magic wand tool missed.