53 replies to this topic

[Doug Nye]

That's wonderful.

 

Interesting to see him affect the hyphenated form of his given names Maurice Louis.  I have for donkey's years always used the Maurice-Louis form.  It could be argued it just appears rather more classy - which after deeper digging through this summer I suspect is the reason why he adopted it.

 

So what has convinced me he merely adopted it?

 

Unlike, for example, the more commonly hyphenated Jean-Pierres of this world, no official public records of Branger that I have viewed include in his case a hyphen between Maurice and Louis - not his birth record, nor marriage certificate, nor divorce paperwork etc.  These contemporary references all read 'Maurice Louis'.  So in the volume soon to be published including a selection of his motor racing photography we use 'Maurice Louis' - unhyphenated - while up-front we point out the alternative and explain why we have done so.  

 

In contrast similar official French register records for the likes of Jean-Pierre Beltoise do feature a hyphen.  Against this background we have in Branger's case been confronted by a choice and I opted to be pedantic.

 

If anybody wants to see his hyphen restored to him, I find that a tiny stroke of pen on page usually does the job.

 

DCN

[rl1856]

DCN:  You mentioned that the source media is a Glass Plate.  Do you know how plates, and other media (photographs and negatives) are scanned ?   Many of the forum participants may benefit from the knowledge of a professional service when contemplating the conversion of their physical media to digital files.    Thank you Sir.

[Doug Nye]

Hmmm - scanning quite large format glass plates can be a conundrum.  For starters most affordable scanners have a backlit 'transparency' window catering at the largest for 35mm negative strip or maybe 2 1/4-inch square format.  So 18cm x 13cm (7-inch x 5-inch) rigid glass plates?  Forget it.  

 

The bright idea then occurred of laying one of our plates on the scanner bed, simply placing a light box, upside down, on top to provide the light source, then scanning in the normal way using the light-box illumination.  I laid a glass-plate neg on the scanner bed, added a protective pane of glass over it, then the lightbox we regularly use to view both colour and black-and-white transparencies, inverted on top that.  

 

Switched it all on and ... the lightbox refused to illuminate when face down.  Point-blank it refused to light up.  Right way up was fine.  Upside down, forget it.  

 

Oh.  As you were...

 

So I then made up a little frame to hold a quality-lens digital camera at a fixed level above the very simple, very basic lightbox, which illuminated just fine when right way up.  

 

Laid the glass plate on the lightbox.  Frame and camera above that - experimented with fixed length or slight telephoto to avoid parallax distortion - then shot a range of different aperture/shutter speed images of the glass plate from which to select the best.

 

All very amateurish - no doubt anathema to the pros - but, hey, it's worked just fine across a broad range of individual image-file sizes.

 

The biggest plus, of course, is that a plate scan which would take perhaps 3-5 minutes to scan conventionally can be 'scanned' in this way in perhaps just a 30th or 60th of a second.  Cue Photoshop - what a wonderful toy, I mean tool - and once the resultant images are cleaned-up we have been extremely happy with the results.    

 

As here - Leon Théry in the Brasier, 1905 Gordon Bennett Cup  French Eliminating Trial (presented here at low resolution)

 

Photo via The GP Library/Doug Nye

 

 

DCN                                                                                                                                                       

Edited by Doug Nye, 31 October 2023 - 11:30.

[rl1856]

DCN-   Thank you sir.