Work steadily continues on the recording and surveying of
the churchyard of St Mary’s Church in Embsay-with-Eastby.
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| A ghostly spectre ponders: "Who put the lights out?" |
It’s been a steep
learning curve but we appear to have cracked the RTI process for photographing
the gravestones and, though we say it ourselves, we are proud of the
results.
It’s amazing how taking under-exposed
pictures then illuminating the stone with flashlight from several angles can
reveal such faded inscriptions.
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On 25th August Gareth and Nicole Beale from the
Centre for Digital Heritage at the University of York came for a meeting with 4
of us from the group – between us representing both the St Mary’s Project Group
and Upper Wharfedale Heritage Group – to discuss progress. We are very excited
that Gareth & Nicole have asked us to help them write guides to RTI photography
for other community heritage groups to use.
If we can roll out the technique making it available to groups similar
to ours the potential is enormous – RTI could be used not only for cemeteries but
for archaeological artefacts, graffiti carved into wood and stone, and many
other uses.
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| Recording gravestones without RTI |
After a detailed and very useful discussion about the RTI
technique and the format of the guides – and a lunch provided by Sue (Thanks
Sue!) – we took Gareth & Nicole to the churchyard for a quick look at some
stones. Nicole was rather taken by the Tait memorial with its ornate
decoration, and spent some minutes taking a large number of photographs – she has
since sent us the results of using these simple photographs to create a 3-D
image. Another technique we’re very excited about. Hopefully we’ll soon be
investigating this one as well.
The next issue to tackle will be the table-top graves with
the horizontal gravestones. Chris Lunnon has devised a bar that will hold the
camera directly above the table-top – hoping to try it out at the next session.
For more information about RTI see the Digital Heritage
Centre’s website pages on Re-Reading the British Memorial project : http://ourti.org/
