Broken Headstone at Mount Pleasant Cemetery

Mount Pleasant Cemetery is the oldest cemetery in Sioux Falls, SD. It is where I have found many of the interesting grave markers to model and share here.

I saw this one on Friday when I was walking leisurely through the cemetery and I was inspired by the obvious age but dignified appearance of this particular headstone. I was unable to read it as it is badly worn from over a century of exposure to the harsh climate of South Dakota, but I did find that when I applied a raking angle of light on my model, a few letters became legible. Maybe someone out there can read what this headstone says?

In spite of being broken and worn, it is still treated with great respect. At some point in the past someone had tried to repair it but the wear and tear of the extreme seasons here undid the repair and the top of the headstone now rests at its own foot.

I used a manual focus 50mm lens on my Nikon D200. I set my Nikon to f/22 & 100 ISO in Priority mode. I shot in RAW format. I knew I couldn't hold my camera steadily enough to prevent blurring, so I used a tripod.

When I arrived at home, I imported the RAW photos into Adobe Lightroom where I checked them for proper exposure, sharp details and made any necessary corrections. I exported the corrected photos as 16-bit TIFs.

I then masked the TIFs and saved the masks as PNGs.

Finally, I imported the TIFs & PNG masks into Agisoft Photoscan Pro and set all the options at the highest quality output. When Photoscan was finished several hours later, I exported the finished model as an OBJ file with the texture and mesh together.