Murray Family Monument

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Here Is Another Late 19Th Century Family Monument At St Michaels Catholic Cemetery In Sioux Falls, Sd. I Thought It Would Make A Great Project To Practice My Hobby Because Of The Multi-Veined Stone, The Weathering And The Lichen That Grows In Patches All Over It. I Used My Nifty Fifty Manual Focus Lens With My Nikon D200, Manual Settings At F22 Iso 100 In Raw And Set It Up On A Tripod With A Cable Shutter Release To Minimize Vibration. When I Started Photographing The Stone, It Was A Partly Cloudy Day With Plenty Of Clouds, But Mother Nature Has A Funny Way Of Sometimes Throwing Little Monkey Wrenches Into My Photographic Sessions. In Some Of My Photos, They Were Mostly Even And Well Exposed As I Had Planned When The Clouds Filtered And Softened The Sun, But In A Few The Sun Suddenly Burst Out. Of Course I Could Have Waited For The Next Cloud To Move Across The Sun, But I Had Drank Too Much Diet Coke Just Before Starting And There Isn'T A Loo To Be Had At The Cemetery. (Curse My Overactive Bladder!) Luckily, Since I'D Shot Everything In Raw, I Was Able To Compensate At Home After Importing The Photos Into Adobe Lightroom. I Exported Them As 16-Bit Tif At Full Size And Then Imported Them Into Agisoft Photoscan. I Normally Would Have Masked Them First But I Was Feeling A Little Lazy Today. Instead, Once Photoscan Had Aligned All The Photos, I Adjusted The Bounding Box To Build The Dense Cloud For The Monument Only, I Used The Ultra-High Quality When I Created The Dense Cloud Model, Then I Used The Maximum Possible Setting When Creating The Mesh. The Resulting Model, While Good, Seemed To Be A Little Soft In Terms Of Details, But I Attribute That More To The Fact That The Monument Wasn'T In The Best Condition After Almost 125 Years Of South Dakota'S Harsh Climate Wearing It Down. I Had To Decimate It In Meshlab As The Original Obj File Was A Hefty 1.8 Gb. It Was A Bit Tricky As There Are Some Faint Details That Would Be Easy To Lose If I Was Careless. I Have Begun To Grasp Some Of The Basics For Meshmixer And Enjoy Using It To Reorient My Models And Generally Closing Holes In My Models. In This Instance, I Left All The Holes As There Seems To Have Been A Lot Of Them Besides The Obvious Big On Under The Monument. I Can'T See Them, But Meshmixer Did, And I Was Afraid That Automatically Closing Everything Up Might Result In The Loss Of The Inscriptions Or Finer Details That Faintly Show Up. So, I'Ve Decimated The Model A Small Bit And Left It As Is So Anyone Else Out There That Wants To Use It Is Free To Modify It As Needed.

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