Full Title: Bespoke Scanning When Resources Are Barely Limited,
Dear Reader (2025-06-09),
It is good to be home. I have now returned from my recent walkabout. As per my normal, I don’t yet know how I am going to approach the record and sharing of that wander. I have started a first pass of the images, and they are not all dreck. For instance, I know of at least one person who will get a kick of out today’s image.
The restoration of The Night Watch (4.37 m wide by 3.63 m high) by Rembrandt is slowly being performed behind a glass wall at the Reichstag Museum in Amsterdam. There is a platform that can move up and down for members of the restoration team. Attached to the platform (or perhaps it is independent) is a very sophisticated scanning bed. The platform and scanning bed are supported by two large pillars bolted into the wall, one on each side of the painting.
The scan of The Night Watch “is the largest and most detailed photo ever taken of a work of art. It is 717 gigapixels in size.
The distance between two pixels is 5 micrometres (0.005 millimetre), which means that one pixel is smaller than a human red blood cell.
The team used a 100-megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS-camera to make 8439 individual photos measuring 5.5cm x 4.1cm. Artificial intelligence was used to stitch these smaller photographs together to form the final large image, with a total file size of 5.6 terabytes.” (https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/…/ultra-high-resolution-photo)
Today’s image was captured with a medium quality camera phone surrounded by onlookers, with minor corrections in photoshop.
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As always, all comments are welcome and sought.
Cheers, Sean
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