May 23

This week, we met a few more folks around the Brevard Veterans Memorial Center including their curator, Ed Pingston. Given my plan to digitize many of the museum’s objects, it was of course nice to finally connect with the curator.

For this week, we worked to photograph many of the objects out in the Museum’s plaza. We had determined that it would likely only get hotter as we moved deeper into the summer through June and July and it would, thus, only get more unpleasant to be outside.

The memorial center includes a plaza with numerous memorials and monuments to soldiers of various conflicts.

I showed Trent how I do the photography of an object, and we proceeded to take pictures of the monuments. This included monuments to major conflicts including Vietnam, the Korean War, both World Wars, as well as to fallen allies, service dogs, and even chaplains.

Most of these monuments are relatively small – about as tall as a person. These are generally easy to photograph and can be photographed with just a cell phone, which is what the two of us did.

For a few of these markers that were taller, I used my drone to take photographs of the portions of the markers that were not readily visible.

For this week, I tasked Trent with making an account on one of the websites where people share 3d models (sketchfab) and making a shared google drive with the photos he took of markers. I also directed him to two different 3d modeling programs which both have free/open access, Reality Capture (which has free access for educational purposes) and Meshlab, which is open source. I have basic experience with Reality Capture and none with Meshlab – both have lots of users and support online, so the two of us can get familiar with both of these programs fairly easily.

My final task for Trent this week was to play around with Reality Capture to make a model of something, and we’d see how it came out.

On my end, I produced models of a few of the monuments and markers. Each of these were quickly produced in Agisoft’s Metashape, which is a paid program for which I have previously purchased a license. In each case, I quickly made a model, taking little care to attempt to clean up/optimize the model. These had essentially no processing or prep and were all created using settings for relatively low resolution/quality to speed up computing time.

My hope was to quickly re-familiarize myself with the process of both photography and model production, as it has been a period of years since I spent significant time doing this. The models revealed challenges where some details are missing and other areas where the structure of the monuments itself (particularly glossy/shiny black granite) interfered with production.

The above model of the Operation Iraqi Freedom marker, for example, shows irregularities toward its top. Here, this indicates that I did not have proper photography coverage of the top of the marker. Easily rectifiable the next time I am back at the BVMC.

This Korean War marker is good on its front and base, even showing clear separation from an area that is suspended above another area, but suffers greatly from the reflectivity of the shiny black granite that make up the vertical portions on its back. This can, perhaps, by rectified by additional photography on a cloudier day where there are less clear reflections and less harsh light.

The Purple Heart marker is generally clear on its front face, but its rear which was also a fairly glossy surface has irregularities.

The model for the Dixie Doughboy is generally fairly good, and this was one that required drone photography, but does show areas where particularly fine detail in the object is lost.

As quick mock ups/prototypes, these are all okay but obviously not great. Many of them have sort of floating/phantom elements, even without suffering from reflectivity. These can be reduced greatly in the processing stages by working to eliminate stray and erroneous data points. They all also have open bases – I believe I can export my models to a program like Meshroom or Blender, another 3d artifact editing software, and manually fill in/cap the base or other holes that appear. For handheld objects, you can photograph all sides of an object, including its base, but for a monument in the ground, you obviously cannot.

Regarding that point of photographing all sides of an object, including its base, this weekend I am going to meet with a contact who used to own a photography store and talk about how better to do the actual photography of objects. There is a photogrammmetric workflow called “shooting in the void” that I am going to try to adapt/integrate for museum object photography.

Another issue I had was that, given the heat, my cellphone (a Google Pixel 9 Pro XL – a relatively recent flagship phone) had issues overheating and this caused it to fail to capture photographs on some occasions and on other occasions to restart. It was, admittedly, very hot and in direct sunlight for a long time. In my discussions with the above referenced photography contact, I will talk through if it makes sense to secure use of a dedicated DSLR or similar camera, which will be less likely to have similar issues with overheating. There are certainly some cameras around campus which I could likely find use of between those in the CHDR, the history department, and those available for checkout from the library.

For next week, Trent, Ed (BVMC Curator), and I are going to walk around the museum and start to pick out the objects from their collection that we would like to make models of.

The BVMC is going to block out a meeting space and time for Trent and I on Wednesdays to have a room to use to photograph objects without disturbing anyone starting on June 11.