Fun with PhotoDoc – Edition 2

Fun with PhotoDoc – Edition 2

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I’m back for another edition of “Fun with PhotoDoc”.  If you missed the first edition you can check it out here.  Originally I had planned for that to be a one-off post, but then I thought it might be fun to make this into more of a series, sharing interesting facets of photographic documentation (aka PhotoDoc) as they come up.  Really, it just gives me an excuse to share all the things about PhotoDoc that I think are just plain cool and to make gifs out of treatment documentation photos, which is so much fun!
This time around I wanted to share some interesting before treatment photos of two War Bond posters from the Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County’s collection.  For both of these I photographed the posters using normal illumination and then used raking illumination to highlight tears, cockling and bends/breaks in the paper.

With this War Bond poster the raking illumination really shows off that large tear that extends from the center to the bottom of the poster. And while the normal illumination allows for better visibility of the water damage in the bottom left hand corner, raking light better highlights the resulting cockling and distortion of the paper in that area.
With this War Bond poster the raking illumination really shows off that large tear that extends from the center to the bottom of the poster. Under normal illumination this substantial tear gets lost in the pattern of the female subject’s dress. Also, while the normal illumination allows for better visibility of the water damage in the bottom left hand corner, raking light better highlights the resulting cockling and distortion of the paper in that area.

For this poster, raking light really highlights all the undulations and cockling that have been caused by the poster being partially adhered to a piece of board. You can also more clearly see the fairly large tear located under the word "Hun".
For this poster, raking light really highlights all the undulations and cockling that have been caused by the poster being partially adhered to a piece of board. You can also more clearly see the fairly large tear located under the word “Hun” under raking illumination versus under normal illumination.

Jessica Ebert (UCL) – Conservation Technician

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