Guerrilla Photogrammetry

Since my enlightenment into the world of 3D imaging in 2013, following a seminar by Graeme Earl and his Southampton colleagues and the beginning of the MicroPasts project, I have been creating models of artefacts from around the world.

My first model I ever made was of Gudea, a wonderful piece of sculpture in the British Museum collection. After I made that, my model making started to become a formal part of my work, and I transferred that aspect to the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Guerrilla model making

My first real outing in another institution, was with Tom Flynn (now of Sketchfab), who worked with me at the British Museum. We both went to the Museums and the Web Conference in 2017, held in Cleveland. We heard a talk by Jane Alexander about all the things that the Cleveland Museum of Art had been doing and how 3D work was a barrier due to complexity. We took an outing to the CMA and scanned about 12 objects and processed them overnight before our presentation the next day.

Since then, I have been scanning objects in museums and galleries around the world, when ever I get the chance. I have created scans of all the Assyrian reliefs on public display in the British Museum and large amounts of the Parthenon marbles.

Museums scanned in

I have so far made scans in:

• The Louvre Abu Dhabi
• The British Museum (after I left their employment)
• The Cleveland Museum of Art
• Tokyo National Museum
• National Gallery of Art, Australia
• Victoria and Albert Museum
• Smithsonian
• Mit Rahina Museum, Cairo
• Ashmolean Museum

I try to make all my imaging available for others to reuse, currently I have an open folder on Google Drive and also deposit photo sets on Github and Zenodo and issue DOIs for the dataset.