Hi lit. I photograph books for a living. Yup, I actually do that. Rare books and manuscripts mostly. While I'm working I sometimes have to wait for an image to process or transfer or whatever, and that's when I come over to browse /lit/. Sometimes I make a thread and post some of the stuff I've shot, and that's what I'm doing now. Title pages, covers, illustrations, etc.
>>7815035
How do I get a """"""job"""""" like yours?
Always wondered how that's done. What resolution do you work in?
>>7815052
be a photographer then go to a library and offer your services
>>7815055
different resolutions for different material. also depending on the size of the object. we usually do 600 for manuscripts and 400 for printed material, but it varies. FADGI level 4 at least.
>>7815035
Would you be so kind as to post your favorite photographs?
>>7815062
it's hard to pick a favorite. one of the things is that these are usually large files of 40+MB and I have to chop them down to post. I haven't chopped many down lately, but here's one of my favorites. it's pretty small. someone poked this last page over and over again with something sharp. what the hell was the matter with them? why did they?
>>7815060
Do I need to be an established photographer, or just some guy with a DSLR?
>>7815085
well, don't be just some guy with a DSLR, please. I'm really working hard to promote this work for photographers. I don't feel like ranting right now but a lot of institutions are hiring "just some guy with a DSLR" in the mistaken idea that photography is just like pointing your iphone at something. nowdays it usually is, but it's more complicated than that because of ensuring a high quality standard involves knowing color management, and also shooting 250 500 pages books is more complicated than it might seem. Naming is really crazy hard, actually. Librarians and archivists overname everything.
Hi, that's pretty sweet. I went and saw an art collection from the House of Alba recently. I found myself more fascinated with the texts they had instead of the artwork. A letter from Rousseau, illuminated bibles, maps charted by Columbus—dank stuff. Keep on keeping on.
>>7815085
But you can also go to a uni library and ask them what they're doing and just volunteer and ask what you can help with. do that for a while then you can probably get some work. the "digital humanities" are the hot thing now but the boat is getting full.
shooting the kelmscott chaucer was another favorite
>>7815115
I have a DSLR and some knowledge of stuff like that. What sort of lighting setup do you usually use?
>>7815166
2 profoto D4 500w/s heads at 45 degree angles. they do very well and the powerblock regulates them well so we don't have color shift over the course of a book (we always balance the whole session anyway as part of post processing)
Kircheri title pages are great
15th century botanical
it's not all old stuff. periodicals especially are turning to dust b/c of the high acid paper, they weren't meant to last. so actually it's the more recent stuff we should be more aggressive about preserving.
>>7815213
Dank.
Post processing mostly RAW or PS?
>>7815675
I shoot in RAW to Capture One and process out as uncompressed TIFFs. There's very little post, actually, aside from cropping, since it needs to be an untouched facsimile of the page - I don't try to make it look "better", just produce as close to an accurate repro as possible. But there's no accounting for peoples color balance on their monitors so I really really try to get the color target to travel with the other images. It's the key for so many things, like scale and resolution besides color.
hey OP, these are great. Have you got any cool books you could share with us via torrents? Something elegant, colorful, full of great caligraphy?
Also, do you read at home, after spending your whole day working with books? Post a few of your fave authors/books.
>>7815077
a. He hated it. Maybe just the ending.
b. Child.
I doodled plenty of books in my youth.
From what book is it anyway?
>>7815732
I've tried the torrent thing but I freaking can't figure out how to create a torrent. It really bugs me that I can't seem to get the torrents I've made to lift off. I try seeding them but they don't seem to get picked up. I followed the damn step by step tutorials but shitpissfuck why won't it work? Then I just get bored and go back to my photo work. I was thinking about putting them up on mega or some other share.
I read on the train to and from work. Right now I'm reading The Shaking Shadow, a gothic paperback about some poor girl thrown in with relatives in a castle and inheritance and seances and all the typical stuff, it's so corny. So yeah I've developed an appreciation for lowbrow paperbacks but I'm also really liking the journals of Lewis and Clark, and one of the projects I'm working on is a lot of old diaries, so it relates. Ocean voyages so far, mostly, ship logs. I just did a first edition of The Nights of Straparola, which I'd never heard of and looks good so I'll probably read that next.
>>7815744
The Book of Knowledge.
>>7815161
more info on this one plzz
This Clarissa came in a nice paper wrapper
>>7815786
the kelmscott chaucer you can find with google easily. William Morris founded the kelmscott press and also did a lot of Roycroft stuff with Hubbard.
These are pretty damn sweet OP, I wonder what they look like in full res
>>7815818
it's a great lens, Schneider-Kreuznach 80mm and the phase one backs are really nice. i just tried to do a 1:1 crop but it was 36MB.
Whoa. This is neat to read. Tell us more, OP. Is there anything you dislike in doing your job? What's the average time in processing a book? Do you work alone or do you have other people to help you?
>>7815852
I dislike working in academia, it's just as fucked up as the corporate world but they hold a lot of collections and get the funding, so...I'm working on bringing "cultural heritage imaging" out of the big Libraries Archives and Museums and into the local libraries. The LAMs are eating all the funding and hence deciding what is archived and shared. Takes different times to process different books, it's really all over the place. Autocropping is really changing that, it takes forever to line up the crop for a book page, especially if it's an old book the pages aren't usually at right angles and it always looks crooked, especially if the text block is at an angle also. Missing pages take forever to track down and insert and then rename every damn file. I work with three other photographers and four other part timers who do the bulk of the processing, but I'm basically the studio manager who handles the special cases and sets up workflows and specs equipment. I've been here 8 years but have been doing reprographics to a lesser degree for longer than I want to admit here. But the larger institutions are getting hamfisted with the way they handle things and there is such a flood of places that want thier stuff shot at a high standard and put up online that my freelance work is taking off and I'm working on being more legit as a company. I'm especially interested in privately held collections and that's my next target.
this one reminds me of family feud
going home, maybe more later. i will try to find a good way to share full res besides the torrent thing.
what's your salary like these days? And what was it 8 years ago when you started? Best of luck with your company, hope you get those private collections!
Hi, do you have any old texts in Spanish you could post?
>>7815914
kek.
Anyways, I like what you're doing here. Torrent would be groovy, especially if you're doing full texts.
here's a cool bootlegged copy of ulysses I found in my university's rare book and manuscript library
>>7815932
torrents are not that hard to make, and I'm sure that, if you posted the torrents here, people would pick them up soon enought.
On another note, do you work as a freelancer or for a company? How do you go about offering your services to a library, do you just call them up? How willing are they to let someone photograph their stuff?
>>7815771
Oh, A+B combined then.
>>7816078
I will give it another go, thanks for the encouragement
I work freelance and also for a university full time. you can guess which one pays the bills but I could change that if I can manage actually becoming a business. the work is out there, no question. everybody wants their stuff "digitized" these days and if you can get the funding for a nice camera and know how to use it then you can make the work happen. You've got to make friends with the curators and librarians, though. Let them feel comfortable with you, share your interest in the books with them, and talk to them about what you want to get involved in. There is so much to do in the field. I start people doing the processing, which means they sit at a screen all day and literally make crops around page edges one by one. Hundreds and hundreds of rectangles every day, but if they can deal with it and they're not jerks they can end up on a camera and working with the books.
from an album of civil war soldiers
>>7816581
whoa that's really cool and pretty
how old is the text?
>>7816622
19th century horse manual. there were hundreds f them. i made that animation because i was trying to figure out how to display things in books like this. the ball in the upper corner is mapped to a trackball and that lets you move through the animation by moving the trackball. i made it by hacking another program that lets you view relief in objects the same way. i also made a better version where i erased the sticks frame by frame in photoshop.
>>7816685
that is so cool, thanks!!
>>7816690
the horse books were very popular, since they were basically the cars of the 19th century.
"substraction of mony"
>>7816725
so when was spelling invented
>>7816729
>>7816901
That's some fancy handwriting. I love it. Any more with them gorgeous ye olde penmanship you can show us or will it be included in the torrent?
Thanks for sharing OP this is really neat
>>7817872
i'll look for more of that fancy shmancy stuff. i think i've got a whole book of flourishes
>>7818009
it's fun to share it
i'll try the torrent sometime in the next few days and post it here
the iron in the ink has burned through the paper.
This is one of the best threads I've read on /lit/
>>7818133
cool i'll try to keep posting as long as i can.
>>7818099
Fucking nice!
Where are you working?
>>7818299
thanks. northeast US
>>7818456
How old is that map?
>>7818472
I'm not sure, sorry. I only have renamed JPGs with me and not the master files where the call number can help me find the data but...maybe 17th century?
>>7815702
Cool, thx for the answers, looks like you're doing great work
>>7816493
Where are you based?
>>7818456
I'm in Baltimore and am very interested in this stuff. I have loads of exp photo editing in RAW and PS and using cameras and handling artwork. Trying to not wait tables here haha
>>7815620
that text alignment and line wrapping is triggering me.
>>7818640
same
>>7818601
I think around that time I was shooting a lot of stuff from 1500 -1700 so that fits.
>>7818606
Get thee to The Walters. Look for PT work processing images or whatever. Volunteer if you have to but if you get in there and do well you'll probably get picked up. AVAM is someplace I've thought a lot about working for, don't know if they're photographing their stuff or not.
>>7818640
>>7818862
better text alignment
>>7818952
Word, thanks for the advice
>>7819033
It's pretty cool to be able to work with this stuff.this is the oldest thing I've worked with I think. Papyrus from an Egyptian book of the dead, between 300 and 150 BC. I did some cuneiform tablets that might be older, though. Stuff from all time periods can be just as cool, though. the volumes i did from independent presses was very beautiful
Great thread, OP, really interesting stuff.
>>7819056
thanks
>>7815115
>that pic
Can you read that? I tried it but my paleography is a little rusty, sadly.
>>7819245
try this
>>7819093
I'm so intrigued by this. So what is the Book of shapes about? Can you share any more pics of this? Thanks.
>>7819309
yeah it's pretty amazing. i had no idea there were such shapes. i mean, this goes way beyond circle square and triangle.
sorry to disappoint but the cover was the most interesting. inside were simple line drawing profiles of mostly different types of railroad spike and ties and other railroad iron. but the cover is great so i saved it.
>>7819368
Dude looks like he's tryna s his own d
>>7819377
dude did that on purpose
this horse is sick
gotta split more later tonight
>>7815702
Sweet!
great thread opie
>>7819283
That's some mordor kind of caligraphy
still posting
we live on the surface of the earth
>>7821482
>american education
lolcats have been around longer than you think
>>7821976
No, longer than you think.
>>7821993
awww!
>>7820600
There must be one cool story that needs such illustration.
>>7822148
Incunable of Decameron, 1473
>>7820600
If I'm interpreting the illustration correctly since I don't understand the language it's in, one of the gals there slit the other mens' throats and the other guy's working with the two gals? What a messed up story.
>>7822279
That's the Decamerone for you. Some of the stories in there were censored well into the 20th century.
>>7822279
yes, and there's a lot more of it I don't have small images of, but basically the Decameron is an orgiastic bloodbath. It's s german translation.
>>7822562
>well translated uncensored version
Any version that came out after +-1940 will be uncensored. I have one in Dutch, but I don't think that's of particular use to you. As for good English translations, I have no idea anon, sorry.
>>7822581
Whoa. Dutch? It's cool. It's one of my language learning targets. Will you at least give me the title? Maybe once I managed to work down on that language list in the future I can enjoy the nice subtleties of that book's translation.
