Google Art Camera
Between 2019 and 2020 I was part of the Art Camera Project for Google Art & Culture Department where I got to work with some really great people and discover some amazing technological equipment that I was using for capturing and digitalizing artworks around Europe in the super high quality of 1 Gigapixel. In this project article I'm going to share with you some of my professional experience and insights on the camera and the artworks I worked on.
Project: Google Art Camera
Client: Google Art & Culture
Equipment: The Art Camera
Museums and number of artworks I've captured during the project:
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Galleria nazionale di Parma - 45 artworks
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Leopold Museum - 50 artworks
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Belvedere Palace - 27 artworks (mostly Gustav Klimt)
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Museo Palatino - 5 specific artworks
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Este Castle, Ferrara - 48 artworks
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Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent - 5 specific artworks
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Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon - 50 artworks
What is the Google Art Camera?
The Art Camera is a robotic camera, custom-built to create gigapixel images faster and more easily. A robotic system steers the camera automatically from detail to detail, taking hundreds of high resolution close-ups of the painting.
In addition to the basic definition for the camera I can add that the camera were in reallity 3 different camera lenses depending on the size of the artwork and the focal lenght we needed to use to capture it. There are 3 lenses as it follows:
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- 300mm - used mostly for small sized artworks, imagine something in the range of 50x70cm dimensions or smaller than 1.2m2
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- 400mm - which was for artworks with dimensions higher than the previous one and up about 200x200cm and in this case the camera would be positioned at a distance of no greater than 4.1m - 4.6m away from the artwork
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- 600mm - that was used for the most sizable artworks where they'd have bigger dimensions than the previous one and you'd need to position the camera at least 4.6m distance away from the painting
How does it work?
As explained briefly above, the camera choice depends on the size of the artwork but that is not the end of it. That is just the first step, after which you need to adjust all the lights and light up evenly the image. For that you'd need also to have the rest of the space to be as dark as possible, so we don't get any side light noise from other light sources.
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For adjusting the light we would be using Light Meter with which we can measure that we've evenly lit the painting from all sides. We would also have at our disposal even number of LED panels to help us achieve that goal.
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In the below images you can take a look at my sketches and get a more detailed look of the process that I used to draw so I could understand it better myself.
Additional photos
And at the end of this short article I'm leaving you with some more images from my work assignments during that amazing project.
