Recently, as part of Brown’s 250th celebration, my colleague and I were asked to photograph a selection of the many historical objects at Brown. Among these was the Transit of Venus telescope, a Gregorian reflecting telescope made by Watkins and Smith of London, and donated to the University by Joseph Brown. The telescope is named for the event it was purchased to observe: the movement of Venus across the sun. The transit of Venus was observed by Brown, Benjamin West, and others on June 3, 1769 – and more recently on June 5, 2012.
The final version of the Transit of Venus telescope, photographed on site in the Lownes Room.
Thankfully, my colleague and I did not need to address any planetary movements to photograph this object; however, we did need to photograph it on-site in the Lownes room at the John Hay Library. We brought our backdrop, lights, and camera, and it was a relatively simple setup. We were careful to set up the camera so that the lens and angle of view did not distort the telescope in any way; our main challenge was actually positioning the lights. The telescope is incredibly reflective, and while changes in tone help show the shape of the telescope, and some highlights are useful for showing surface texture, initially we were getting long streaks of blown-out highlights, causing a visual distraction within the overall image.
Our straightforward lighting setup gets the job mostly done – all we have to deal with is the large highlight streak in the center of the telescope.
After trying multiple approaches – from changing the position and distance of the lighting, to a system of reflectors – we decided that our best option was to make two captures to merge together. To keep image distortion to a minimum, we decided to keep the setup largely the same, but to reposition the angle of one of the lights for each shot. Once finished, we had one image that was properly exposed except for a blown-out streak on the right side; and another with the lighting problem on the left. Layered in Photoshop, it was easy to merge the images to create a single image that accurately captures the telescope without the distracting highlight.
The two vies of the telescope – the only differences are the positions of the highlights, created by repositioning and changing the angle of our lighting equipment to reduce the glare.