Artifact Photography

The artifacts pictured here all come from the collections of the Hunterian Museum and the University of Glasgow. Notice how the different materials require different lighting, different exposures, different scale types, and slightly different orientations. Some have been edited to present two sides of the same object together or to remove the color from the background. It's easy to think of photographs as completely objective (especially photographs that follow such a strict set of representational standards) but they still involve a lot of subjective choices behind the scenes. Archaeologists and photographers make choices to try and represent these artifacts as accurately as they can, but there is always a human element at work.