The record behind the sheet in your tube: the file we worked from, what we measured, what we chose and why, what we are allowed to sell, and the framing dimensions for this sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Attributed to Wilbur and Orville Wright; the shutter was released by John T. Daniels. [First flight, 120 feet in 12 seconds, 10:35 a.m.; Kitty Hawk, North Carolina], 17 December 1903
- Object
- Dry-plate glass negative, nominal 5 × 7 inches; measured 17.73 × 12.62 cm
- Held by
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Wright Brothers Negatives
- Accession
- LCCN 00652085; digital id LC-DIG-ppprs-00626
- File
- The Library's own master TIFF, 5000 × 3604 px, 18 MB, uncompressed greyscale — taken directly from the institution and not from an aggregator
- Crop
- [57, 66, 4941, 3542] → 4885 × 3477 px, the whole plate with the scanner ground dropped
- Printed at
- 40 × 30 cm sheet: image 33.60 × 23.92 cm, 1.90× — 369 dpi available
50 × 40 cm sheet: image 41.36 × 29.44 cm, 2.33× — exactly 300 dpi, printed pixel for pixel
Both files built at a flat 300 dpi, the most matte fine art paper resolves. Nothing enlarged in software. - Made in
- The certified house nearest your address, to one specification: 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks, same colour profile, same border geometry.
Which digitisation, and why
Two open files exist for this moment, and they are not of the same object.
The Smithsonian holds an 8 × 10 inch photographic print made from the negative and publishes it at 3000 × 2208 pixels under CC0. The Library of Congress holds the glass negative itself and publishes its master scan at 5000 × 3604 pixels.
We take the Library's file. At our 300 dpi floor the Smithsonian file carries 25.4 cm of picture and the Library's carries 41.4 cm, so the large sheet would be impossible with the former. More than that: a scan of the plate is one step closer to the morning than a scan of a darkroom print made from it, and it is the only one of the two that still shows the plate — the border, the chipping, the corner that is missing.
Why we print the damage
A piece of the bottom left corner of the plate is gone. There are dark stains along the lower edge, the black border is chipped all the way round, and at the left there is a faint standing figure that moved during the exposure. The plates of this collection spent several days under water in the Dayton flood of 1913, and the Library attributes the scarring on some of them to it.
None of it is retouched and none of it is cropped away. In the edge measurement, 380 rows of the file find no plate at all — that is the missing corner, and the scanner's white ground shows through where the glass used to be. Cropping past it would mean cutting the object to hide what has happened to it, which is the one thing this shop does not do. Same line as Talbot's Wrack, where the album paper stays in the corners.
What we measured
The scan carries about sixty pixels of white scanner ground on every side; the plate border is dark. A pixel counts as plate below a value of 235, an edge is set where six consecutive such pixels begin, and 2,500 columns and 1,800 rows were read as a distribution. The plate's top edge runs between pixel 66 and 105, the bottom between 3524 and 3542, the right between 4927 and 4941 — a hand-cut, chipped plate, not a machined rectangle.
The anchor is the file's own scanning resolution, 700 dpi, stated in the TIFF header. That is a figure we would normally distrust — at Cleveland the same tag was a meaningless default — but here it is corroborated by the object: 4885 pixels at 700 dpi is 17.73 cm, and a nominal 5 × 7 inch plate is 17.78 cm. The Library's catalogue rounds the plate to 18 × 12.5 cm, which implies a ratio of 1.440 against a measured 1.405; the measurement agrees with a true 5 × 7 plate to a third of a percent, and the rounding does not.
Why there is no 1:1 sheet
Because the object is a negative. There is no original print size to reproduce — the Wrights' own contact prints are a different object again — and a 17.7 cm picture would be a curiosity rather than a print. So both sheets are enlargements and the factor is printed on the size you choose. On the large sheet the file, not the paper, sets the width: 4885 pixels at 300 dpi is 41.36 cm, a little under the 42 cm our border rule would want, so the side margins run wider than usual.
What we are allowed to sell
The photograph was made in December 1903 and published long before 1930, so the American term is exhausted; the three men the Library names as photographers died in 1912 and 1948, so the seventy-year term in Switzerland, the EU and the UK ran out on 1 January 2019 at the latest. The Library's own record says: no known restrictions on publication. The plate is flat, so no new right arises in the scan in any of our markets. We name the Library as the source and never as a partner.
A note on tone
The file is a strictly neutral greyscale — measured, the most saturated pixel in the whole picture reads 0.000 — and we print it that way. No toning, no sepia, no warming. Some of our photographic sheets are warm because the object is; this one is not.
Framing this sheet
- 40 × 30 cm sheet
- A 40 × 30 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 16 × 12 in. Margins 3.20 cm each side, 2.83 above, 3.25 below.
- 50 × 40 cm sheet
- A 50 × 40 cm frame. Nearest standard 20 × 16 in. Margins 4.32 cm each side, 4.91 above, 5.65 below.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 33.00 × 23.32 cm for the small sheet, 40.76 × 28.84 cm for the large one. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
Please measure before you buy or cut. These figures describe the file we print from. Sheets are cut by machine to about a millimetre and frames vary between makers. We replace a print that arrives damaged or wrong; we cannot replace a frame or mat that turns out not to fit.
All records: museartis.com/pages/sheet-records · Questions: info@museartis.com