Any idea how to build something like this?

[jymbee]

Given this is a tractor forum it seems to be a perfect place to ask a question about photography. Not necessarily for resident photography experience (although I'm sure that exists here) but most of us rural folks have had to rig up all manner of contraptions to come up with a solutions to various problems. But this one is beyond my level of expertise.

We have a photo studio and one specialty is photographing products & artwork-- mostly for crafts people that need images for juried shows & artists interesting in reproducing their work. We have a new potential client that is interested in having us photograph a large number of custom quilts. Sizes ranging from relatively small up to 8x10 feet and larger. Typically we use either our wall mounted hanging system for flat artwork or a vertical camera system where the subject lies flat on a shooting table.

Many of these pieces don't have any kind of hanging "pocket" and are too large to shoot vertically. What we want to come up with is a way to hang these flat against a wall to photograph. We've experimented with different approaches ranging from tiny pins (not strong enough for heavier pieces), to clamps (cover too much of the material and hard to keep sides straight) etc. Many of these pieces are quite delicate so whatever we come up with must keep that in mind.

One concept I've tossed around is whether some kind of vacuum mount system could work? If strong enough a "box" of some kind at top & bottom might have enough vacuum power to hold a large quilt flat in place. Don't even know where to start to come up with something like this or even it it would work. Interested to see if perhaps any inventor types out there might have some thoughts as to how such a system might be constructed, whether it would work or perhaps have another suggestion altogether?

 

[/pine]

To employ some type of vacuum device I think would take something like that is used for industrial dust collection...I don't think even a commercial type shop vac would hold the heavier quilts...?
Rather than vertical wall space...would you have the room/height for a table or floor room with a trapeze type overhead camera?..

 

[quicksandfarmer]

Years ago I built a table for woodworking where the top was pegboard over a hollow box. The box was connected to a dust collector. The vacuum would hold the workpiece and the sawdust would get sucked up. I recall that I had to drill out the pegboard to 1/2" holes to get a satisfactory amount of airflow. The dust collector wasn't a shop vac, it was a 220v dust collector, I think around 700 CFM.

With a quilt you might find that the vacuum flattens it out, or that the pegboard holes telegraph through.

Quilts are really meant to be viewed lying flat and horizontal. Wouldn't it be easier to work on a setup for that?

 

[marchanna]

The vacuum box idea could work. You could use peg board, plywood and 2x2’s. You would likely have to make some channels inside to control and direct some of the vacuum pressure. Also a coarse grit sandpaper or paint with sand in it on the contact surface would provide some grip.

 

[jymbee]

To employ some type of vacuum device I think would take something like that is used for industrial dust collection...I don't think even a commercial type shop vac would hold the heavier quilts...?
Rather than vertical wall space...would you have the room/height for a table or floor room with a trapeze type overhead camera?..

We actually do have a ceiling mounted system we can use as well however one of the things we want to do is to use our automatic panorama head to take a series of images (4 rows and 4 colums e.g.) and stitch the resulting images into one very high res final image. We have a web portal where viewers can zoom in to see very fine details and even small thread patterns. But it was just too clumsy to attach this rotating system to our mount hence the ideas around something like this. Plus for some of the subjects where we only take one shot we'd prefer to use something like a 100mm macro prime and the distance between subject & camera would rule out the ceiling mount.

 

[jymbee]

With a quilt you might find that the vacuum flattens it out, or that the pegboard holes telegraph through.

Quilts are really meant to be viewed lying flat and horizontal. Wouldn't it be easier to work on a setup for that?

Yeah, my fear is that even if it would "hold" it might compromise the actual material. I suppose if we had a system with tiny holds completely covering a very large surface that might work better, but that require much more of an effort/expense to build to be worth it.

See my earlier comment as to issues with a vertical setup...

 

[jymbee]

The vacuum box idea could work. You could use peg board, plywood and 2x2’s. You would likely have to make some channels inside to control and direct some of the vacuum pressure. Also a coarse grit sandpaper or paint with sand in it on the contact surface would provide some grip.

We have experimented with a "near vertical" system where the piece was laid on an inclined platform which had some sticky material mounted on it, but found we had the same challenges I described in another post with the straight vertical system.

 

[Slowpoke Slim]

Large wall and a staple gun?


How about just getting 4 or 6 or whatever number of folding convention tables, either buy or rent them? I mean the kind like you see being used at gunshows, etc. There are rental companies that rent them out. Get enough to cover the square footage of the piece you are trying to photograph and just lay it out on the tables. Maybe even a sheet (or sheets) of clean plywood (or melamine, cleaner, smoother surface) to then lay over the top of the convention tables to provide a smooth, non-broken surface under the fabric. If you're worried about line breaks showing through from the tables.

Then just rig up an over head rigging to support the camera, and trigger it remotely.

Done and done. And it can all be taken down, put away when not in use, so not hogging up floor space.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

Some back of the envelope numbers on a simple pegboard vacuum system:

The suction of Shop-vac's is rated in inches of water lift, quick Googling tells me that a 16-gallon has 52 inches of lift, which is equivalent to 1.9 PSI. So if you had an opening of 10 square inches that would be 19 pounds of force. That would be horizontal force, the amount of vertical force would be determined by the amount of friction, but intuitively it seems that the vertical force would be at least equal to the horizontal force, so you could hold 19 pounds of material. A higher friction surface would be helpful -- like the rough side of pegboard.

Box-store pegboard has 9/32" holes on 1" centers. The area of a 9/32" hole is just about exactly 1/16 square inches, so 10 square inches of opening is 160 square inches of pegboard -- or a 16X10 area. So far, so good.

Looking at it the other way, if you had a 6x6 foot quilt that weighed 20 pounds, how much suction would you need? A 6x6 foot square is 5184 square inches, pegboard of that size has 324 square inches of opening. To generate 20 pounds of force only requires 0.06 PSI of vacuum, or 1.7 inches of water lift. That doesn't sound that bad either.

I think you're going to find that the key is controlling air leakage, the less flow the higher the suction. You might run into a problem that the quilt is too permeable to form a good seal. You also need to cover the parts of the table that aren't covered by the quilt. My thought is to use pieces of Tyvek, which will seal and should provide a background that is unobjectionable for photos.

I think the handling would be easiest if the table had a way of pivoting, so you can lay everything out flat, then turn on the vacuum and flip the table vertical for the shoot.

A 4x8 sheet of pegboard is about $15, it seems like you could experiment and get an idea of whether it's going to work rather cheaply.

From a business perspective the nice thing about solving hard problems is that they're hard, you can charge a premium for solving them.

 

[SPYDERLK]

Perhaps you could make a very light wall/platform, strong enough to raise to a suitable angle after placing sample, using honeycomb cardboard panels:

ULINE - Shipping Boxes, Shipping Supplies, Packaging Materials, Packing Supplies

Four by eight by 2" thick panels/sheets are only 10 pounds and quite rigid.​