060073 VU Photography for archaeologists (2025S)

In archaeology and the cultural heritage sector, broadband photography is still an essential documentation technique primarily because it is assumed to provide an ‘objective’ pictorial record. In addition, photography is often used for analytical purposes; many analyses of archaeological artefacts like clothing, paintings, or ancient manuscripts start with a specific photographic recording of the object using visible, near-infrared or even near-ultraviolet radiation. Additionally, photographs are often acquired as input for an image-based 3D modelling process that extracts accurate surface data of the imaged object or scene.

Although cultural heritage photography in the film-based era proved very successful, the advent of digital photography in the 1990s opened up an entirely new world. It brought along all the well-known benefits of acquiring, storing, manipulating, and retrieving imagery. Combined with the constant technical improvements in camera technology, digital photography replaced its analogue counterpart at the beginning of the 21st century. Over the past two decades, the number of digital cameras has increased exponentially, and even global economic recessions could not prevent new camera designs and lens types from appearing constantly. Today, (almost) everyone has a digital camera, whether embedded in a tablet, phone, computer, or glasses.

Despite this, many people are still not at all familiar with the fundamental behaviour of their digital cameras. Cameras still mystify to a great extent, which makes maximising their potential difficult. Although this is not a big deal for holiday snapshot photography, it might become an issue when the photographs become an object’s sole digital documentation or the source of new data (e.g., digital surface models, colour-accurate representations).

This course aims to help archaeologists understand digital cameras, their technology, sophisticated features and related imaging concepts. In short, the overall aim is to provide a good, technically sound insight into the basics of photography. The course will, therefore, cover a wide range of topics: the basic principles of light and colour, the operating principles of the human eye and digital imaging sensors, photographic exposure principles and lens technology, white balance and colour management, image quality and resolution, metadata and file formats as well as photographic composition and basic image processing.

Each lecture will focus on one or two topics, which will be explained theoretically and via practical, hands-on exercises. This approach should enable students to make informed decisions about the photographic strategy to be followed, as well as the hardware and software solutions best suited for their intended purpose. Although creative techniques will be touched upon, the course mainly teaches documentation-style photography to deliver images suitable for archaeological documentation workflows (e.g., on an excavation) or useable in image-based 3D modelling pipelines. To this end, the topics will be presented slightly more in-depth than typically found in photography manuals. This is done on purpose since simplified explanations often make slightly wrong assumptions, which might ultimately lead to more confusion. Additionally, this approach should allow students to explore other photographic topics more easily.