For many years, students of the Shroud have been using a group of microphotographs included in the “Image Library” of the website shroud.com, taken from the “Mark Evans Collection,” and individually labelled “ME-02” to “ME-32,” although not consecutively, as not all the micrographs are included. Twenty-four of them can be seen on sindonology.com. There is an index, originally typed but annotated in pen, locating each image on a grid, which seems to be related to the one published in the original plan, except that when the Shroud was unrolled in Turin, it was the opposite way round, so that A1, which was going be at the foot of the ventral legs, was on the dorsal instead.
Original Test Plan
As it was laid out in Turin in 1978
This seems to have led to some confusion. Slides R2-F24, R2-F28, R2-F20, R3-F19 and R6-F4, from D15, D14, D15, D7, and C8, on the typed index, and relabelled ME-03, ME-05, ME-06, ME-08 and ME-24 in pen, have also all been annotated “Sm. of Back.” As we can see, areas D14 and D15 are indeed on the back in the top grid, but D7 and C8 are on the chest. On the other hand D7 and C8 are on the back in the lower grid, but D15 and D15 are on the chest. The typed descriptions of these slides are Blood, Body, Blood, Image and Blood, and their magnifications are 6.3, 32, 32, 32, 54.
Some possibility of resolving the confusion may come from identifying the precise location of specific slides using Shroud 2.0. This can be done with slides containing distinctive marks, such as the edges of blood water or wax stains, or burn marks. They are at a fairly small magnification, so as to include a recognisable patten. Here they are:
And here are their locations on Barrie Schwortz’s Shroud photo:
Note that all but the burn have to be flipped horizontally, as they are back to front on the sindonology.org website. These photos are clearly identified as being from these places, and are at the following locations on the lower grid, from left to right, D2, E3, B6, C8 and F11. Four of them are correct, but the blood mark from the small of the back is wrong on this grid, but correct on the original test plan grid. Whether similar confusion applies to the other slides is anyone’s guess.
Mark Evans was a graduate student from the Brooks Institute of Photography, and went to Turin with Ernest Brooks, its founder and president, and Vernon Miller, a tutor, who was designated Head of Scientific Photography. In an article by Sam Pellicori, in Archaeology magazine (The Shroud of Turin through the Microscope), Pellicori describes the capturing of these photographs in detail, and describes Evans’s contribution:
“Extensive testing by Mark Evans, then a graduate student at the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, helped establish the required illumination, exposure time and film calibration on a replica of the Shroud before the trip to Turin.”
Intriguingly, Ernest Brooks himself is not credited with taking any pictures at all in Turin, and Vernon Miller seems to have concentrated on the ultraviolet fluorescence photography. He is not mentioned in the Pellicori article. Nevertheless, after he died, a large collection of photographs, including twenty-four of the micrographs, were published on a website called shroudphotos.com, where they are headed: “Miller took many 35mm color micrographs ranging from 6X to 64X magnification of blood marks, body image, scorch marks, burn marks, water marks, wax, and the clear cloth of the Shroud. It was Vernon’s photographic skill in capturing these microscopic views that allows us to see and understand the Shroud image at its fiber depth.” However, Thomas D’Muhala and Gilbert Lavoie, who host the site, do not seem know which of the collection they inherited were in fact taken by Miller and which were not. He was certainly responsible for the UV fluorescence images, and does seem to have taken images of the whole Shroud, in three sections, which may bear comparison in quality with Barrie Schwortz’s own more available full-Shroud images, but the micrographs were by Evans, who is not even mentioned on the entire site, and many of the “4 x 5” images were in fact taken by Schwortz.
Seven of Evans’s images are labelled “Image,” and by close observation, we may be able to verify some widespread but not necessarily evidenced information, regarding the superficiality of the image, the uniformity of image colour, the “half-tone” effect, and so on. For this magnifications of at least 32X are essential. Here are the images and their descriptions in Evans’s index:
Unfortunately these all cover too small an area to be pinpointed on the Shroud, but the Locations listed all correspond to the descriptions, such as “Foot” or “Eye.” There are anomalies, which we must note, but in the absence of any way to reconcile them, we must proceed regardless. The oddities begin with the rather curious sequence. We might guess that “R” and “F” stand for ‘Roll’ and ‘Frame,’ but must be surprised that, considering almost all the photos are from either the top (“Eye,” “Nose”) or bottom (“Foot,” “Heel”) of the body, that they alternate so randomly between one and the other. It does not seem probable that the photos were taken in that order. Note that ME-25 and ME-26 are of exactly the same place; sindonology.org says they were taken under different lighting conditions. Next, we must note that every one of these slides is back to front. The Z-twist of the thread should be represented by striations from top-left to bottom-right on each section, whereas all these images show them from top-right to bottom left. For further analysis, they will be presented correctly.
Firstly, note a couple of features that occur across the whole cloth, namely the counter-intuitive slightly zig-zag weave of the under-three-over one twill weft threads, here emphasised in blue, and also a place where two warp threads run exactly alongside each other, emphasised in green.
Next, although the variation is small, it is clearly not true that all the ‘coloured’ fibres have the same intensity. This huge enlargement of part of ME-29, slightly contrast enhanced, shows clear differences in intensity between fibres, and even within fibres. It also shows colour diving deeply down into the crevices where one thread overlaps another.
Next, there’s “Blood,” but only a single image of it at large scale, ME-06. On the index, marked only Blood, from D15, magnification 32X, but with the annotation “Dense, from Sm. of Back.” This is unfortunate. D15 is the Lance Wound on the “Turin” index, and the Blood Belt on the Original Plan. It could be either. Another image, ME-05, is indexed “Body,” from D14, but annotated “Sm. of Back – Blood,” but does not seem to contain any, and a third, ME-24, is sadly too out of focus to be useful. Comparing the first two, however, can give us an indication of how different in colour the Shroud blood is from the rest of the cloth. Below are the two images (ME-06 and ME-05), and below that they have both had their red component emphasised by increasing the saturation on Photoshop.
We can see that if there’s blood on the right hand image, there isn’t much. We can also note the areas on the left where the blood has been almost entirely eroded away, and ask ourselves if there is pristine, unimaged thread underneath.
This brings us to the next image I’d like to consider, ME-15, called “Clear Cloth,” from Location C13, just to the left of the face of the image. It is either slightly confusing or slightly disappointing, or both, in that it looks quite out of place compared to most of the other photos here. It is not obvious that the lighting, exposure and development are the same as the other photos. Nevertheless, some interesting ideas can be suggested by manipulating the image and comparing it to others. Here is the “Clear Cloth” between “Image” photo ME-16 and the “Blood” image ME-06. The manipulations are described below.
Top: The unmanipulated micrographs, as copied from sindonology.org.
Rows 2 – 4: Using the ‘Adjust Hue/Saturation’ enhancement in Photoshop, all colours are grouped as either Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue or Magenta. All these were selected individually and their saturation maximised. Only Red, Yellow and Green caused any change at all, so Cyan, Blue and Magenta are not shown here.
Row 2: It seems that Image and Blood are heavy with red pixels, which are scarcely represented in the Clear Cloth photo.
Row 3: All three areas have yellow pixels, more or less interspersed with the red ones in the Image and Blood.
Row 4: But only the Clear Cloth includes green pixels, which are scarcely represented at all in the Image and Blood.
Rows 5 – 7: In an attempt to isolate features of the three types of photo, the ‘Replace Color’ enhancement has been used. Typical colours have been selected, by running a ‘pipette’ over typical areas of Image, Clean Cloth and Blood, and adjusting the ‘fuzziness’ so that large areas of the selected feature are selected. These have then been replaced by Yellow (Image), Blue (Clean Cloth), and Red (Blood).
Row 5: An area of Image can be seen in the Blood slide, and some Image colour can be seen where the blood has been eroded away, but no clear cloth. This suggests that there is image under the blood, contrary to the observations of Heller and Adler.
Row 6: A small amount of blood can be seen in the Image slide (which confirms the suggestion in the index that this slide is both Image and Blood), but none on the Clear Cloth slide – not surprisingly.
Row 7: This seems to confirm that image intensity is modified by the amount of clear cloth that appears among the image fibres.