Histories of Heritage Imaging at the John Rylands Library (Part 2)

The Imaging Placement

By Alex Nightingale and Millie Martin

We are MA Library and Archive studies students who were selected for the placement working with the uncatalogued glass plate negatives. Alex has some experience in photography, although never digitisation, whilst Millie comes from a bibliographic background.

Once the glass plates had been cleaned by Iris and Sabeth, they came to us in the photography department. (If you have not already, you can read about their work here)

Alex photographing a quarter-plate glass negative

The plates arrived on our desk carefully rehoused and numbered by Collection Care, alongside a spreadsheet which told us which plates to photograph. To get as many plates digitised as possible, we focused solely on the quarter-plate negatives. For this task we used one of the John Rylands’ Phase One XF camera bodies with an IQ4 back and a Schneider 120mm macro lens.

Once we had put on our nitrile gloves (to prevent the plates being damaged by oils from our hands), our first challenge was the fact that we were photographing two different media. For the negatives to be captured on camera, we needed to use transmitted light. This meant placing a light sheet underneath the plate, and illuminating through the glass plate, we also placed a black card cut-out around the plate to prevent glare from the light sheet. The envelopes, however, required reflected light from a pair of LED panels placed to each side and at 45 degrees to the subject, standard flat copy photography.

Millie preparing an envelope shot

The negatives themselves are black and white, so colour balancing was not necessary, but for each of the envelope shots we included a Golden Thread colour checker, which allowed us to accurately balance the colours in post-production and include a measurement scale.

Maintaining a consistent aperture and ISO on the camera, we adjusted the shutter speed to compensate for how dark or light the negatives were and fired the camera shutter from a tethered computer to avoid any camera shake from pressing the on-camera shutter. The images were captured directly to the laptop using the Capture One image processing software. Shooting tethered allows us full control of the camera and its settings.

In Capture One, we converted the images to black and white, and then flipped the light and the shadows to invert the image. This was often the most exciting part, as it allowed us to really see what was on each of the plates. We were both astonished by the level of detail that could be retrieved from negatives this old, and it was fascinating to see how heritage photographers of the past handled their collection items. For instance, there were a lot of bulldog clips used to hold books open, which no modern heritage photographer would ever think of using!

A digitised and inverted glass plate showing a book with a map of Cambridge held open by bulldog clips

Once the plates were inverted, we adjusted the levels of light and shadow to bring out the most detail possible, and then all the files were exported as .TIF image files to be uploaded to the University of Manchester preservation system prior to sharing via Luna or Manchester Digital Collections following catalogue record and metadata creation.

We did encounter a few unique imaging challenges. For example, one of the plates had a layer of dark red paint daubed on the back. This appeared to be Iron-based paint, used for masking areas of an image prior to it being printed. This left us with a question: do we still only shoot a transmitted-light negative, or should we also take a colour positive image to show the paint itself? As it was a rare occurrence in this collection and there was also an inscription scratched into the paint, we decided to shoot both.

A glass plate negative with red masking paint around the edge

Whilst on the placement, we also had the opportunity to work with some different types of collection material and photographic methods. For example, we were able to digitise the entirety of Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum Historum, which is a “monster” of a book and is now available in its entirety on LUNA here.

The Monstrorum Historum R52153 [Image credit: Alex Nightingale]

We were also able to try our hands at some Multi-Spectral Imaging processing, using the Phase One Rainbow MSI system to capture wavelengths beyond the visible light spectrum to read an inscription which had been damaged a long time ago.

Images taken during multispectral imaging (during visible light exposures) [Image credit: Alex Nightingale]

A washed-out inscription in Incunable 17287 made visible with multispectral imaging

We are both extremely grateful for the opportunity to see behind the scenes in a working photography studio, and learn how to handle such a wide variety of materials and photographic techniques. We cannot wait for when the collection goes live, so that people can see the result of our hard work!

Following on from the Imaging placement, our third and final blog post will be by the placement students allocated to the Cataloguing of the physical plates, and Metadata creation for the digital records.