Dates
July 2002 — June 2003
Principal Investigators
Dr. Michael Hawley
(Department of Architecture and the Media Lab)
David Salesin
(Microsoft Research)
Goal
To advance educational uses of expeditionary photography, and to promote synergy between the Web,
digital photography, and advanced printing technologies.
Overview
Expeditions are life-altering learning experiences for scientists of all ages and they share several
aspects. They require a liberal synthesis of technologies and talents (something a university's hardened
departmental structure seldom promotes). They are ambitious, and embrace daunting challenges. A great
expedition can fire up intellectual adrenaline and offer unparalleled stimulus for growing better people,
as well as fostering better ideas. They require real work on real problems in the field — a process
that is often difficult to manage, or simply difficult to fit in given MIT's rigorous calendar, and the
other attractive cornucopia of campus activity that distracts.
The iCampus Expeditions: Learning from Pictures project leverages several important movements:
MIT's open courseware movement, which ultimately offers the flexibility to let students maintain
coursework via network; a larger sense that MIT scientists and engineers need to be much more globally
involved; and strong indications that the world's environment (both natural and human ) is in desperate need of insight and attention. A need to make it possible
for MIT talent to tackle these problems and to motivate and equip ourselves to do so, was determined
and became the impetus for this project.
The first two expeditions in this project were to Bhutan and Cambodia. The work done in Bhutan has
resulted in new photo archiving software, and the world's largest book, which became available in
December 2003.
Making the Bhutan Big Book
High Tech meets Low Tech: How the World's Biggest Book was Made
Taking Pictures
Our work began with the idea of using field expeditions to drive better field photography. Every
science team in the field, from Indiana Jones to a Boy Scout troop, has an implicit obligation to
collect the best possible record of their work — especially in pictures. In the not-too-distant
old days, an MIT field team conducted expeditions on Mount Everest, shot several thousand film photos
— and all of the slides were shuffled and mislabeled by the processing lab. This had to get
fixed.
We went to Bhutan knowing the deck was stacked in our favor: a more photogenic country is
hard to find, and our charter was to explore the whole kingdom in the company of young children growing
up there. On several expeditions, the whole team — a mix of MIT staff and students, Bhutanese
young students, Bhutanese officials and friends — was equipped with the latest digital photo gear
to capture a collective portrait of that corner of the world.
We shot a mix of film and digital. Film was shot with Canon EOS-1v professional 35mm cameras, L-series
pro lenses, and Fujichrome RVP-35 (Velvia) film. The team also used a mix of digital cameras — Canon
D-60's, Nikons, etc. A GPS recorder was used continuously for the whole ensemble. Every night, the GPS data
was loaded into a laptop, as were all of the compact flash memory cards from the cameras. MIT software was
used to process the imagery, to merge in the GPS data (each image thus has embedded atlas location information),
add captions, and build a daily archive that the team could review over dinner. The data was also backed up
onto pocket disk drives. During dinner, the team could review the whole day's photography, which often
attracted a crowd.
Keeping Pictures
On return, hundreds of rolls of film were processed — but not cut. The uncut slide film was scanned
using Kodak's Professional HR 500 scanner. Kodak's technology made it possible to scan the imagery at grain
resolution, which for Velvia, yields an image of about 6x4k pixels. Because the film was uncut, Kodak's
machine made it possible to scan dust-free film that moved through a well-registered film transport, each
frame held flat and in focus. Because the film was fresh and dust-free, Kodak's Digital ICE artifact cleaning
system had minimal work to do.
The film scans were then poured into MIT's archiving process, and onto a 2.54 Terabyte RAID server donated
by Apple Computer. Because the Canon pro film cameras also record shot data, that data was uploaded, merged
with the GPS logs, and the result was a scanned film archive identical in form to the digitally-shot archive.
Making and Sharing Pictures
Using the full suite of Adobe professional image processing tools, along with special custom techniques for
scrubbing grain noise and minimizing CCD artifacts, the team began experiments in very high-quality printing.
HP's DesignJet 5500 is the only printer in the world capable of 5-foot-wide prints on fine art media at fine
art quality with the kind of capacity that made this project possible. The printed results are stunning, and
have an archival life estimated at well over 100 years. The team has worked very closely with HP to fine-tune
print quality, and to develop a production strategy to print out the books. A copy of the giant book requires
400 feet of 5-foot-wide archival paper, about two gallons of ink, and 25 hours of print time. No other technology
in the world is capable of this.
Books are a great way to share ideas, but binding a book this size is not a trivial detail. The job fell
to Acme Bookbinding, the world's oldest continually operating book bindery, based in Charlestown, Mass. The
book is assembled by fan-folding the rolls like a gigantic Asian "accordion-style" book. Each
folded roll is gathered into what might be called a "signature" in Western bookbinding parlance.
The signatures are tabbed with long strips of archival cloth, and the tabs are stitched into the binding.
Because of the fan-folding and tabbed stitching, the book is durable enough to stand upright, and the open
page spreads lie flat with a minimal center crease and no sagging or drooping. There are no alignment
problems.
Of course, if the big book held all 30,000 images from Bhutan it would weigh quite a bit more. All of the
images are stored in MIT's archive, fully browseable on the Web. In fact, when images are captured in the field,
they are immediately archived in the same form on the field notebooks: it's simply a matter of mirroring
the imagery to home servers for permanent archiving and sharing. With this image pipeline, everything a field
team captures can be almost transparently stored in a sensible, sharable and safe repository.
Project Output
Links
MIT + Friendly PlanetImage Archive
Michael Hawley:
world's Biggest Book Tour
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