A Lens Characterization Method for Low-budget High-quality Museum Photography

Image sharpness is strongly dependent on lens aperture and camera position at capture. As high-end equipment is out of the reach of many museums, these choices are often mostly based on visual evaluations of image sharpness, which—though still possibly resulting in good quality images—is highly subjective and can lead to inconsistency. In the context of a broader effort to provide low-cost solutions for consistent high-quality museum photography, we propose a methodology for the characterization of the performance of a lens in terms of sharpness that enables the selection of the appropriate lens aperture and camera position for the capture of a sharp image of an object without the need for expensive equipment.