Photos of engravings

Yesterday I had an interesting shoot. I was contacted by WGBH (the TV station in Boston that produces some the worlds best documentaries) to shoot some still images for them. They needed photos taken of some engravings that were published in Harper’s Weekly in 1870 for an upcoming film. A book dealer here in Fort Wayne (Every Other Book on Cresent Ave.) had a copy of this rare book, and so WGBH made arrangements for me to borrow this book so that could photograph 7 engravings.

Taking photos of an image in a 140 year old book can be a challenge. The pages are very delicate and have discolored unevenly. Really good lighting is crucial to getting a clean uniform image. Below is one of my favorites.



See an old book like this reminds me of what life was like 140 years ago. This weekly publication had tons of illustrations. I was amazed at the quality of artwork that magazines like this produced on a regular basis. Just think, this engraving was an image etched into a metal plate that could inked and pressed on the page to create the artwork. After the artist finished this one, he was off to work on another one for next week. Simply amazing.

They needed the images as pristine and high quality as possible so I saved them as .tifs. The down side is that they were huge files, at about 30mb for each image. Instead of email, I uploaded them to my website and they could download from there.

Anyway, it was a fun and challenging project. I love the diversity of what I do. Never a dull moment. 🙂

Thanks for reading.

-Ken