This time of year is very hectic at the Faculty of Arts as the graduate exhibitions are due to open in a few weeks’ time – there is a definite sense of excitement around the building that makes everything take on a kind of new level of commitment!

Whilst I have been busy continuing my day-to-day duties in the Design Archives, my involvement with the Gill project has been a little on the quiet side over the past few weeks – until this week! In the meantime, decisions have been made about pieces that are going to be exhibited in cases rather than hung and from what I can gather, wall space and the sequence of the items being hung is also very close to being finalised. This week I have determined any additional Gill works that will need conservation attention and scheduling this work in for next week. I have also been consulted on the best way in which the items in cases should be secured.

Yesterday I spent the day in the studio photographing the objects that were conserved by myself and Melissa Williams in the first selection of objects needing conservation attention. We do the digitisation using the medium of photography as opposed to scanning by having a set-up of two flash units to assure even lighting. This also means that there is as little exposure to continuous light as possible, minimising any long term light damage to any colours in the long run.

Currently the objects are stored in their own individual made-to-measure Melinex sleeves that are sandwiched between two very large pieces of plywood strapped together. Due to the size of the items, this is to not only protect the works during transportation but to encourage the flattening process further while the works are in storage with limited space. This type of care makes not only all the conservation work worthwhile, but makes the items easier to handle and to eventually frame. Transporting the works from our storage area to the photography studio on the second floor safely required some major team work!

After the large items had gone through a flattening process, handling them on your own is close to impossible. For the photography to be done safely, I needed an extra two pairs of hands to help me. The large scale items were done in the morning with the help of my colleagues Barbara Taylor and Madeleine Meadows. I decided against photographing a few of the pieces due to their size and the weight of the paper as I had concerns about their safety using the T-pin system. In the afternoon I finished photographing the smaller objects on my own, after which all of the works were taken back to storage prior to framing. Some of the this will be done in-house by Dave Cooper but the larger items are going to be delivered to a local framing shop.

What I wanted to do was to use Gill’s ‘European Aerodromes’ poster from 1930 to do a little test with. This poster was small enough for me to scan but I also wanted to photograph it to compare the two different digitisation processes.

When digitising by using photography a lot of the very fine details on objects get lost in the process, despite using a high quality medium format camera with a digital back. With a digital photograph of this nature, colours seem a little more subdued compared to ‘reality’ and the focus always appears to be a lot softer than it should be. This could of course also have something to do with my eyes and the ability to focus the camera properly! A lot of the surface detail appears to get lost, and the object can look very two-dimensional and flat. This method is, of course, a suitable way in which to digitise objects that are not likely to be enlarged to anything bigger than their original dimensions.

Scanning with high quality equipment gives the objects a lot more detail and therefore makes them somehow more alive; colours tend to be more vibrant even before any adjusting is done on Photo Shop to get the digital file as close to the original as possible. I have scanned items before where there has been a tear or a hole – and when the scanning is done to a high standard, you can almost feel the paper fibres on screen when zooming in to the details. The surface of the object  has a three-dimensional quality to it when you are able to see the roughness of a surface – almost like looking at it through a microscope. Scanned objects like this then have the potential to be reproduced even bigger than their original dimensions without losing too much of the information in the process. Scanning sometimes makes me feel as if I am making objects a little bit ‘over-realistic’.

Either way, these types of issues should be taken into consideration in archives and museums that are dealing with digitising flat pieces of work. Of course the quality of a digitised item is also dependant on what it has been digitised for. I personally feel that if you are going through the process of digitising materials, the time it takes should be used efficiently and the aim should be to create a digital file to a very high standard. This also means eliminating having to scan or photograph an object more than once by having a good quality, high resolution file from which to work from. This can then be re-sized and used in many different ways – from possible reproductions to publications, databases and the web.