Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Medium Format / Film / Digital Backs – and Large Sensor Photography => Topic started by: TechTalk on May 20, 2020, 02:22:06 pm
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The Rijksmuseum has just put online a fully zoomable viewer of the recently completed and highest resolution image ever made of Rembrandt's colossal masterpiece commonly known as The Night Watch. The famous painting is undergoing a multimillion dollar examination and restoration by the museum. Not only is the project huge, so is the painting! It measures nearly 12 x 15 feet! The museum has built a glass room around the painting where visitors have been able to watch the process. It will be scientifically imaged in several different ways in addition to the visual images being captured. It will be photographed in 3 different resolutions: "Low" at 50 microns of subject resolution, "Medium" at 20 microns (just completed and posted online), and eventually a high resolution image at about 5 microns of subject detail.
The online image has been compressed from the original TIFF images to JPEG for viewing, but are remarkable nonetheless. A link to the image viewer can be found here https://twitter.com/erdmann/status/1260118711920472070 (https://twitter.com/erdmann/status/1260118711920472070)
Updates and more information on the restoration project are here. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/nightwatch (https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/nightwatch)
There is an interesting article that details the imaging process located here. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-night-watch-painting-rembrandt (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-night-watch-painting-rembrandt)
A YouTube interview, that details some of the project and history of the painting, also shows some of the "low res" capture process from last year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luyNxew_g4Q&feature=emb_logo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luyNxew_g4Q&feature=emb_logo)
I hope anyone with an interest in art will be able to visit the Rijksmuseum at some point in their life to see in person what these masters of light, shadow, and color were able to accomplish. I visited some years ago and still remember the inspiration and awe that I felt then.
Much has been written about The Night Watch over the years and its history. If you're interested, this is a decent starting place to learn more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch)
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The actual capture resolution, at 1270ppi is not terribly high but the project was very interesting to follow especially when you know some of the people involved, and considering the size of the painting and the scale of the conservation work put into it, the results are impressive.