These effects that were created by Matthew Paris can only be seen by casting a raking light across the illustrations. 60r, Figure 3b.4) and on the laths of the boat (fol. 49r, Figure 3b.3) as well as the brick work of the abbey church (fol. This effect can be seen on the folds of draped clothing, the necks, and haunches of the horses (fol. These hidden features are the modeling of the surface of parts of the uncoloured vellum. There are some distinct features in the illustrations in the Book of St Albans that are not easily seen by the unaided eye and are not obvious on the collotype facsimile. TCD MS 177 f57r, example of gold illustration The extra light was kept on the lowest setting also for this reason and to avoid flattening the green pastel colourisation seen throughout the manuscript. The large reflector was kept in the same position throughout the shoot to avoid image exposure and the white balance changing too much once the extra lighting was temporarily added. The purpose of using the extra light whilst photographing the miniatures with the gold illuminations was to help bring out the gold highlights which are often hard to capture with the standard lighting set up alone. Whilst shooting the miniatures with gold illumination an extra light was placed in front of the subject and pointed directly upwards towards the large silver reflector, this light was also set to the lowest setting. The large reflector was kept in place directly above the subject throughout the entire shoot. The large silver reflector covered the entire diameter of the subject area and lighting circumference. In addition, a large silver reflector was placed over the top of the camera and over the top of the two flash heads and directly above the subject plane. The standard lighting set up was used for the lighting set up whilst digitising the Book of St Albans manuscript. Lighting set up for pastel colours and goldįor most of the photography conducted within our Digital Collection studios we use a standard twin lighting set up with one flash head placed on either side of the subject positioned 90 cm above the subject and placed at a 35-degree angle towards the subject plane. Overall, the most difficult part of the digitisation process was creating the correct lighting to accurately show the course gold highlights which are seen within many of the illustrations, whilst not washing out the pastel green colourisation. Although, the fact that this manuscript only has 77 folios made the planning slightly easier. Considering multiple expertise needed to be involved throughout the process and the manuscript is permanently stored in high security, I had a limited amount of time to complete all the digitisation. My role first off was to calculate how long I anticipated the digitisation to take place and whether there was a possibility to be able to also capture extra images of a selected number of illustrations using raking light to show the texture within the illustrations. However, the high dynamic range, colour accuracy and ease of use and speed of a medium format digital back camera makes the true hues and gold highlights seen within the miniatures throughout the Book of St Albans manuscript much easier to render correctly.ĭigitising a high value manuscript such as the Book of St Albans involves slightly more planning than other medieval manuscripts as multiple people need to be involved throughout the process to ensure the safety and security of the manuscript. Furthermore, considering a comparison between the resolution of fine grain film and high-resolution digital imaging is still contestable, I do not believe I can immediately say the resolution of the digital surrogate images taken on a medium format digital back camera is well and truly above what can be captured with fine grain film in terms of image resolution. The colour transparency slides show the pastel green hues well. James Facsimile edition in 1924 and in the 1980s a selection of images from the manuscript were captured on colour transparency film and scanned. This high value manuscript was first photographed as black and white collotype prints for the M.R. The digitisation of the Book of St Albans manuscript by Matthew Paris was quite possibly the most anticipated step within the Medieval manuscript digitisation project currently being conducted within the Library of Trinity College Dublin. TCD MS 177 f37v-f38r the martyrdom of St Alban, Matthew Paris, the Book of St Albans
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