MegaVision Update from Founder Ken Boydston
It’s right now.
As many of you know, and some of you know this as frontline participants, the decade of the 90s was a time of great change in the world of photography as we ushered in the age of digital and watched as the age of film, caught up short by this upstart pipsqueak technology, shuttered and spasmed in confused objection.
Through the first decade of the 21st century, the spasms of film diminished and the age of film rapidly settled into its final repose as yet another marker along technology’s diamond lane to the future.
Through this last decade, as digital photography became mainstream, we at MegaVision wondered if there was yet another role for us to play. I suppose we should be satisfied with the role we did play. Not everyone is so privileged to have helped forge the future in the way that we did.
It appears there may yet be more for us to do.
Some of you will recall that before the days of color CCD sensors, we often made a color picture of a dead thing (or anything that could sit still for a few seconds) by sequentially capturing multiple pictures of the thing; each picture captured with a different color filter inserted between the thing and the sensor. In those days, we often imagined not having the filter between the thing and the sensor, and instead having the filter between the light and the thing.
As LEDs became more powerful over the last 10 years and became available with colors that cover the spectrum, it began to appear that our colored light idea might actually be realizable…and without filters. What’s more, because color LEDs are available in many more colors than just R,G, and B, we might just could capture images with 4, 5, 6 or even 7 colors, free ourselves from the boundaries of the RGB color triangle (and the tangled ICC profile mess), push on out to the edges of the CIE color horseshoe, and achieve in the process quantum improvements in color gamut and color accuracy.
So it was that when we got a call in 2007 from a certain Dr. Bill Christens-Barry (who some of you have the privilege of knowing) looking for a high resolution monochrome camera to pair with an LED light source that he had fabricated, my interest was more than a bit piqued. Bill’s reason for the call was that the Library of Congress had heard about work Bill and some colleagues had done revealing treatises of Archimedes that lurked, invisible since antiquity, in palimpsested text beneath the words of a medieval prayerbook (Archimedes Palimpsest). The Library of Congress, having then recently acquired from Germany (for the tidy sum of $10M) the 1507 WaldseemuellerUniversalis Cosmographia (A.K.A., “The Map that Named America”), wished to image the map prior to enclosing it in a special case from which it would not be extracted for many years. NOTE: The map in its case is on public display in the Jefferson Building across the street from the Capitol in Washington DC. If you’ve never been inside the Jefferson, you owe it to yourself to step inside time you are visiting DC.
The combination of Bill’s LEDs and our monochrome 39Mpixel digital back proved it’s mettle on the Map, and thus began a now-going-on-6-year journey to bring this technology to market. Along the way, we have been privileged to image some of the greatest treasures of our cultural heritage. In future updates, I’ll share some tidbits from these forays, some of the challenges involved in working with such treasures, and some of the things we’ve had to conjure up to get the job done. For now, I’ll simply draw your attention to the most recent example of our work to be made public:
Follow the links on to the Dead Sea Scrolls site. Even if your interests lie elsewhere, you will appreciate the story like never before. We are privileged and proud to be a part in this important project.
In my next update, I’ll talk a bit about some of the nitty gritty that make these images possible. If you have any burning questions in the meantime, don’t hesitate to drop us a line.
Best to all,
Ken
#archimedes #deadseascrolls #megavision #kenboydston #imaginginsider
