Thomas Lee, graduate from Northwestern University, a student in one of my web design classes, ex-NUAMPS student employee, has been dedicated to becoming a top photo-journalist since leaving NU. This week, his work is featured on line and in the magazine with his photos about the tuna industry and the impending population crash and environmental disaster from eating and harvesting too many Bluefin Tuna. Congratulations to Thomas on the great feature on a very important topic.

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Harlan and I have returned to Dunhuang to follow-up with the Dunhuang Academy team on the implementation of techniques presented at our digitization training here last June.  Arriving without much in the way of progress updates from the DA team, we were very pleasantly surprised to see that they have been hard at work during the last three months, shooting caves, stitching a large volume of files, and managing data.  The work they are doing is markedly improved when compared to what we viewed on the planning trip 14 months ago.  They are truly becoming a world-class production studio, and we are very pleased to have had the opportunity to teach and work with them on this project.  There is one additional follow-up trip planned for this grant in the spring.  Harlan and I look forward to seeing even greater progress in both production work and international communications over the next six months.

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As part of our ongoing work with the Northwestern University Archives and Northwestern University Library Digital Collections we get the opportunity to do some really great digitization projects. This was a single one off project, but the digitized object is one of very interesting historical significance to Evanston, the location of one of the NU campuses. The 1876 map had significant conservation work done before it was imaged by NUIT A&RT NUAMPS employees Stefani Foster and Dave Look. Stefani appears in the video below.

Library Restores and Digitizes Oldest Known Map of Evanston from Northwestern News on Vimeo.

The map in all of its high resolution conserved glory can be seen on the NUL website: http://www.library.northwestern.edu/archives/exhibits/map/index.html

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From today’s NU NEWSCENTER:

Rare Africa Photos Go Online, Open New Options for Africa Research

EVANSTON, Ill. — This week — for the first time ever — a searchable collection of thousands of rare photographs chronicling Europe’s colonization of East Africa becomes available to anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world, thanks to the efforts of staff at Northwestern University Library.

The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960 began attracting the interest of Africa scholars and others in 2002 when it was acquired by Northwestern’s Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies. The library officially launches the online collection today (June 25).

(READ THE REST OF ARTICLE HERE)

NUIT A&RT NUAMPS and the Winterton Collection

The Digitization of the Winterton collection for NUL Digital Collections and the Herskovitz Library was a great project that we collaborated with the NUL library. Stefani Foster and a large crew of A&RT digital specialists worked for a year with Claire Stewart, David Easterbrooke, and the NUL staff on the imaging of the collection. It is a great example of the type of work that can be accomplished with the collaboration of many different groups within the University.

More NUIT A&RT NUAMPS posts about digitization and cultural heritage projects.

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We worked with Professor Mark Robinson in the early stages of this project, many years ago.
Scheduled to launch this afternoon, it is the main mapping project to get very high resolution imagery of the lunar surface. Professor Mark Robinson was at NU when he won this grant award from NASA. Now he is at ASU and I’m gad to see this project lift off… so to speak.

NASA BLOG about this project:
http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/moon_missions/

NASA live tv of the launch
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

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The rig is up and working in the caves, and the DA team is adapting to the new system very quickly. Today we wrapped up practice shooting on a few lower rows of Cave 12, and then raised the whole rig up 14 feet to the ceiling test the its functionality at the upper limits. The process was slow, and involved a lot of troubleshooting, but ultimately the team was successful in capturing the top row of wall images.

As a plus, we found a great use for one of my favorite rigging accessories, the short-barreled cross (shown below in the Modern Studio Equipment showroom), as a fixed cross brace at the crown of the rig.

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We’ve just completed our second day of training at the Dunhuang Academy. Today’s topics covered lighting, data management, and server. Jim began the day with a presentation which carried basic lighting topics from yesterday into a more detailed discussion of lighting techniques particular to the cave photography.

After lunch I presented on data management techniques and suggested workflow for digitization projects. Again, while covering some basic file management techniques, this talk targeted the particular needs of cave digitization. Afterwards we had an open discussion about shared production storage and archive requirements as the Dunhuang Academy digitization teams begin full-scale photographic efforts.

Tomorrow we begin the day with a presentation by Stefani on post-production practices. While being in the classroom has been nice, tomorrow afternoon we are scheduled to begin the real work of teaching hands-on application of the various principles we have covered.

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This is a “blended”  demonstration,  a graphical depiction of lenses and frames based on different lenses on similar camera setups, and a performed demonstration in front of the screen using the instructors, to depict the camera, (Jim) a foreground sculpture (Stef), and the mural (Chris). This team will go to any length to help make these relatively complicated topics – a little more easily to understand.

I had the honor of starting the training by giving an introductory talk to our trainees. To give a bit of a history of our project, and introduce the Northwestern University team, and lay out the full scope of the three days of lectures.

Stefani did the first lecture discussing why and how these topics came to be decided on, and how the range of the issues were developed, including our visit last summer during our planning phase on this project. It was during this visit last August, where we watched the Dunhuang Digitization Team and came up with the list of topics that we would build a seminar around.

Jim did the first formal lessons. Lecturing on light and lens, and the systems for understanding how we have developed our shooting methods for grottoes documentation. The schedule of nine days is broken out by three days blocks. We have three days of classroom lecture and hands on assignments. This is followed by three days of working with the new scaffolding and rigging under supervision. The last three days, if we stay on schedule will be the three teams working in three separate grottoes independently. This should put this rather massive Dunhuang Academy digitization effort on track before we leave.

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Jim, Stefani, and I arrived in Beijing this evening. We passed the CCTV headquarters in the taxi.

CCTV Headquarters

After a little duck for dinner, we’re all getting some rest before the second part of our journey tomorrow – the trip to Dunhuang where we’ll meet up with Harlan for the training session with the Dunhuang Academy digitization team.

Dinner

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This morning I am off to China, for the equipment delivery of a new camera digitization platform, and to initiate two weeks of training for the Dunhuang Academy mural grotto digitization team. Below is a picture taken in the grottoes last summer when we were on the initial proposal development planning grant.

The planning grant resulted in a a successful implementation grant proposal that was awarded in January of this year. I have the honor of being the P.I. on this project, and I was joined last summer, as I will be on this trip by Stefani Foster, my project director for this implementation and training phase. We have spent the last several months working with Seno and Jiro Moussely of Modern Studio Equipment out of Los Angeles.

We’re excited about seeing the new design and fabrication put into use for the digitization efforts being initiated by the Dunhuang Academy.

The whole team that will be going with Stefani and I are NUIT A&RT employee Chris Wallace, and long time outside contractor on our Chinese projects, China veteran and photographer Jim Prinz. We will be updating the progress of our trips and activities here on thie blog over the next two weeks.

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