Bring Your Blog to Work Day

Recently, my student workers have been complaining that I give them boring work to do. Actually, they would never complain because they are really sweet, so I basically drug it out of them. Also, I must admit that running OCR and converting JPEGs to PDFs is probably not very thrilling. But as it turns out, we recently had a project that got us up out of our desk chairs.

We are photographing works from the UH Libraries Student Art Exhibit for a digital exhibit we are going to produce annually in the Digital Library. We usually scan historical documents and rare books, so working with original artwork was quite a treat (not that historical documents or rare books are SUCH a snore).

Some of these works were enormous, so we snuck out into the library early in the morning and hung them up to photograph them. This was a strictly fly by [early morning] operation that involved us traipsing around with an enormous camera tripod, shoddily nailing things to the wall and then holding them up to make sure they didn't come crashing down. Here's Yuli holding the edge of a painting:

My office has also been the site of some craziness as we digitized these works of art. You might remember my office--my nice, tidy office. Well, when we realized that our photo stand is not operational if you don't own a ladder and your photographer (me) is about 5' tall, we made a makeshift photo station on the floor.

This even involved me scaling office furniture to get high enough to get decent shots. Here I am standing on my desk.

At the end of the day, I doubt very many professional photographers attach their whibal cards to the wall using scotch tape. On the other hand, I am being paid for this, so doesn't that make me a professional photographer? I'll post a link to the exhibit when it goes up and you can be the judge of that.