Heat and Art

[rejectomorph]

Swelterness prevails! Fowerbeds watered only this morning are already parched, blossoms and leaves are wilting, and the air refuses to move. Of course, I remain indoors and listen to the air conditioner hum as it eats electricity and drains the bank account. At least it's cool in here.

An interesting article in todays Sacramento Bee brings the news that The Crocker Art Museum has embarked on a project to put most of its collection online. Much of the article concerns Jesse Bravo, the photographer who is creating the digital images, and describes some of the equipment he uses, and the quality of the finished product.

"A high-end home-digital camera can take a nice crisp photo of 11 megapixels; Bravo's equipment can capture 220 megapixels. Here's another comparison: Most Web-site images hold less than a single megabyte of data; these scans can grab about 275 megabytes. What this means is that you can zoom in on the resulting digital image and see the tiniest of brush strokes, the smallest crazing in the surface of the paint, even specks of dust."

Whoa. 275 Megabytes. That would take me about ten hours to download. The article doesn't say whether any images of that size will actually be posted on the web site. One purpose of the work is merely to archive the collection, though it will also make available to museum visitors some of the works which are rarely displayed, such as drawings which cannot be frequently exposed to light lest they fade. (I suppose that we will someday be able to go to the museum itself and sit in front of a computer and take a tour of the collection just as though we were actually there! Oh, wait!)

I've never been to the Crocker, myself. My visits to Sacramento have been infrequent and brief. The museum does enjoy a considerable reputation, despite being much smaller than museums in San Francisco and Los Angeles. I might get around to visiting it eventually. Or I might get a high speed Internet connection and not have to leave my air conditioned room.

Comments

[greck.livejournal.com]

those numbers sounded crazy as hell, but I did some quick math and he could shoot in 8"x10" large format and scan at 1600 dpi on a good professional flatbed and get 204 million pixels, so I guess that's actually no big deal.

12800x16000 is still a little big to work with on my laptop, though. and that's 586 MB of 24-bit image data, and even today's consumer digicams have 30-bit sensors, so it could really be up of 730 MB per image, easy.

mmmm, so much data.

[rejectomorph]

Eventually, I suppose we'll get immense LED screens that will allow us to view even large paintings at full size, which would be nice. I've visited a few of those museum web sites that have the zoom feature, that allows you to look at sections of paintings at their real size, and the amount of detail they can already capture is impressive.

The quality of the sensors in the new consumer cameras is impressive, too, but the lenses most of them have aren't good enough to take full advantage of the sensor's capabilities. Unless there is some sort of breakthrough in lens technology that can produce lenses of high quality at a much lower price, we've probably almost reached the point where there won't be any real gain for the average consumer from further improvements in the sensors.