Winter 2001
Volume 3, Number 2
  


University Photo/Graphics is now the
Penn State Image Resource Center

By Deborah A. Benedetti


University Photo/Graphics has changed its name to the Penn State Image Resource Center (IRC) to reflect the addition of new technologies and services available to University units.

“We have added new imaging technologies to enhance our ability to serve as an image facilitator for faculty, staff and students,” Fredric Weber, manager of the Penn State Image Resource Center, said. “Our professional staff of photographers, designers and image-processing technicians brings a combined 138 years of experience to the projects we handle for the University.”

The Image Resource Center will continue to offer traditional photography, faculty and staff portraits, research photos and aerial and promotional photography. The center’s slide film processing unit was the first lab at a university to receive the Q-Lab designation by Kodak. It also is the only Kodak Q-Lab in central Pennsylvania. IRC designers will continue to design for print, Web or computer graphics, set design and displays and posters.

“The Image Resource Center provides truly critical imaging services to faculty researchers and students,” Dr. Patricia A. Book, associate vice president for outreach and executive director, Division of Continuing Education, said. “Over the years, the IRC staff members have assisted many faculty and student researchers in obtaining the high-quality images they need for analyzing data, whether it be archaeological artifacts, DNA strands, electronic photo microscopy images or enhanced images from cellular research. The service has been used by visual artists, social scientists and scientists in both research and publication. This unit has also made many special contributions to Penn State, maintaining University assets as archival images of University events — athletic, administrative and academic — as well as capturing images of rare and precious documents.”

Weber described one complex imaging project Image Resource Center carried out for a Penn State researcher involving radioautorads of DNA protein sequences from two separate cells. The researcher needed the images for a journal article.

“The conclusions of the research depended on an image that would show the similarity of the two strands,” Weber said. “The faculty researcher asked us to match the exact bandwidth of the two images of different sizes so that the DNA strands could be compared. To accomplish this task, our staff needed both expertise with techniques in analog-to-digital imaging and familiarity with photographic processing. We were able to combine our expertise to meet his needs.”

Keith Shapiro in the School of Visual Arts shared comments about the Image Resource Center’s service in response to a request to produce slides from digital photographs for a grant proposal.

“Due to technical problems with fluorescence that I encountered while copying dye sublimation prints that were made from digital files, I was unable to get a good transparency film copy the traditional way using a copy stand,” Shapiro said. “With the help of Randy Persing and Fred Weber, I was able to adjust the image file to allow them to use the Image Resource Center’s film recorder to make color transparencies directly from the digital files that were technically perfect in format, color and density. This was possible only because Randy and Fred took the time and had the expertise and knowledge to help me make the adjustments necessary to solve the problem. As a result, I was able to get the grant proposal in on time and to send the grant providers exceptionally good transparencies, a necessity for grants in the visual arts. I intend to incorporate this system using the IRC as a service provider into the curriculum for the Color Photography and Digital Photographic Applications courses that I teach in the coming year.”

The IRC’s first large-scale digital photography project was conducted in collaboration with the College of Education. The idea for the project grew from Dr. David H. Monk’s experiences when he assumed the deanship of the College of Education in 1999. His staff gave him a print poster showing the names and photos of college faculty and staff to help him become acquainted with the college. Monk found the poster a valuable aid and asked his staff to explore the possibility of creating an online photographic directory for the college.

Mike Brahosky, multimedia and graphic design support specialist with Instructional and Technological Support Services (ITSS) in the College of Education, coordinated the project with assistance from the Penn State Image Resource Center.

“The project was a major success,” Brahosky said. “It was a perfect marriage of conventional and digital photographic technologies.”

The conventional method for creating such a directory would have involved having a photographer shoot individual photos, chemically processing the negatives and providing paper proofs for faculty and staff to select their images. After the final images were chosen, the ITSS staff would have had to scan all of the individual photos to create an electronic digital library.

The College of Education project would involve images of nearly 200 faculty and staff, so Brahosky and his team members knew that a more efficient process would be needed. Brahosky contacted the Image Resource Center, and the two units worked collaboratively to develop a workflow process for accomplishing the college’s goal.

“Team effort extended beyond our individual departments,” Brahosky said. “By using a combination of each other’s equipment and resources, we were able to produce a high-quality finished product.”

“This is the first large digital photography project the Penn State Image Resource Center has conducted,” Weber said. “The project was exploratory for us. We learned a lot about creating workflow with another unit, which will help us with future digital photography requests. This project also allowed us to show existing and potential customers that we have the ability and knowledge to work across computer platforms.”

Weber and the Image Resource Center photographers used a digital camera capable of producing images suitable for both high-quality print publications and the Web. They coupled the camera with a 13-inch color monitor. Faculty and staff members could view three images of themselves on the monitor and chose the best one. The IRC photographer would discard the unwanted images on the camera and save the final image to the PCM/CIA memory card. The final images would be edited at ITSS using Adobe Photoshop and transferred to image directories on the College of Education’s Web server.

The ITSS staff also linked the photo images with information about each faculty and staff member in the college’s electronic database. Ultimately, the College of Education’s home page will have a searchable database of faculty and staff that will include photos and information about their areas of expertise, publications and other professional information.

For the project, the College of Education team scheduled a series of photo sessions at a convenient location (221 Chambers Building) over three weeks, allowing 10 to 15 minutes for each photo session. In all, the process took 6.5 days to capture photos for 191 faculty and staff, Brahosky said. According to Weber, conventional photography would have added at least 4.5 days to the project.

As new faculty and staff join the college, they will be asked to set up photo appointments at the Image Resource Center’s portrait studio in Mitchell Building, where the same digital technology will be used to capture their image for the college database. This will ensure consistency for the college’s online photographic directory, Brahosky said.

The Image Resource Center project team included photographers David Shelly, Richard Ackley and Curt Krebs. Fred Weber served as the digital imaging specialist for the project.

The College of Education project team included Mike Brahosky, project coordinator; Eileen Pennisi, Web manager and assistant coordinator for the project; Sharon Patrick, administrative assistant to the dean and project liaison for the Dean’s Office; Karen Mogle, staff assistant to the human resource officer and scheduling coordinator for the project; and Suzanne Harpster, staff assistant to the associate dean of technologies and logistics assistant for the project.

To contact the Penn State Image Resource Center, call (814) 865-6507 or send e-mail to flw1@psu.edu.

The Penn State Image Resource Center (IRC) assisted a University researcher in uncovering minute details on a pottery sherd dating from 1000 B.C. The IRC helped derive exposure factors for the researcher’s X-ray images of the sherd, using densitometric sampling, and then applied digital image processing to reveal stress fractures that had occurred some 3,000 years ago. At the request of faculty in the Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, the Penn State Image Resource Center scanned this image of an ancient bone ring from a 35mm contact print. The image was used in a research publication. The Penn State Image Resource Center (IRC) worked with researchers studying endocrine physiology and nutrition to render this photomicrograph of a coronal section of a chicken brain showing the region of the hippocampus after hybridization with the antisense probe for neuropeptide Y (NPY) mRNA. IRC scanned the original photographic film and then processed the image using edge-detection to show regions of interest, before and after comparison.

This autoradiographic DNA sequence image is a composite of two autorads showing comparisons of the DNA sequences. The Penn State Image Resource Center created the image by scanning both autorads at high resolution and compositing them so that the image could be used in a research publication.
  

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