Winter Festival
As the semester winds down, we here at Digital Production Services hope your winter break is as enjoyable as this Russian winter festival from the early 1800s. Carl Ivanovitch Kollmann’s (1788–1846)...
View ArticlePhotographing the Edwards Cane
Shortly before we left for our holiday break, I had another opportunity to photograph historical materials and objects from the Brown University Archives. We’ve had a number of interesting objects come...
View ArticleA Public Art Mystery: part II (Polygons on Triangle)
Polygons on Triangle, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library, Brown University, c.196-? In preparation of the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library celebrating its 50th year this past November, Digital Production...
View ArticleFebruary
With the heavy snowfall and bitterly cold temperatures we have been experiencing this month, there is something that doesn’t quite ring true about John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “February.” Suffice to...
View ArticleCapturing the Transit of Venus
Recently, as part of Brown’s 250th celebration, my colleague and I were asked to photograph a selection of the many historical objects at Brown. Among these was the Transit of Venus telescope, a...
View ArticleThe Unicorn of the Sea Comes to Brown
I often write about techniques to photograph unusual objects, or situations that involved photographing objects on site. This past Friday, however, we had the unique pleasure of photographing a very...
View ArticleBlack, blue, and gray all over
Last month a blue-and-black dress sparked a mass-scale debate about color theory. Even the New York Times and magazines like Wired eventually weighed in, explaining how color perception is contingent...
View ArticlePortrait un-retouching
A few weeks ago, I was given a photograph to digitize – a pretty standard request in DPS. The photograph is a portrait of Alexander Nesbitt, co-founder (with his wife Ilse Buchert Nesbitt) of the Third...
View ArticleReconstructing the Berrigan Airplane
Brown University Library’s Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays, housed at the John Hay Library, contains a wealth of poetry-related ephemera. A promotional flyer from 1969 — designed to...
View ArticleStereoscopy Digitized
Last fall, the Brown University Library acquired a set of 100 stereographs made of Palestine in 1901. Stereographs are made using stereoscopy: a technique that involves creating the illusion of...
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