Working at Pallant House Gallery provided the opportunity to put what I’d learned about photogrammetry into practice. After a number of tests on items in the collection (Working around image licences and copyright is always a major concern when working with modern and contemporary art), I was able to include a small display of 3d models as part of an exhibtion on British Studio Pottery. With the assistance of the collections and archive team, I was able to capture 3 of the pieces on display. The models are featured on the exhibition page and give visitors a chance to examine the pieces from angles and distances not possible when viewing the works behind glass.

Having previously worked with 3D Zephyr, for this project I worked with PhotoCatch. The capture was done with an iphone, working on a space cleared in the archive to provide as neutral as possible a background. The works were placed on a large sheet of white paper with a handful of marks on them to provide reference to the software. I was pleased with the result though some editing was required - highlighting Blendr as a tool I shall need to learn to use. Due to the environent and limited equipment, getting even lighting over the object was tricky and did result in some areas of shadow across the models.

Trying to capture objects outdoors has certainly been a step up from small objects in a more controlled lighting environment. As I’m only working with my phone and household lights, capturing objects within more complex environements is prooving tricky. The headstones where somewhat successful though an attempt to capture a spitfire while volunteering at Duxford airfield prooved slightly more difficult. Given the scale of the object, getting high angle photos was difficult. Furthermore the background contained members of the public and so was not static. 3D Zephyr rejected most of the photos I took, only accepting 8 with which to try and contsruct the model. As a result, the output was a blurry model only really intelligible from a single angle. More practice needed at the photo capture stage for objects of this size I think.

 After the controlled conditions in which I captured the coin, I wanted to try capturing something “in the field”. I went to a local church and captured a 19th century headstone to test working outdoors. The noisy background added a lots of noise to the point cloud where the program struggled to separate the backgorund from the focal object. With some manual trimming I was able to get an ok result for the front of the headstone.

The most successful result of my first few attempts was this replica 1935 crown coin. Given it’s small size, it was fairly easy to frame the photos so that nothing besides the table on which it sat was in the background. Given it’s shape and lack of any harsh relief or crags, getting an even lighting with just the room lights and a desk lamp was fairly straight forward.