I have started painting, done a couple of exhibitions, sold a few pieces and have my first solo exhibition coming up.
I want to get some good pictures of my paintings but haven't a clue where to start. My friend has a reasonable DSLR and I have a tripod so we should have the technology. Now please talk technique.
Do I simply hang the picture on a white wall and point the camera at it?
Different colour walls?
What colours - pale green, pale yellow or magnolia are the easy options.
I will try to post some samples of the pictures so you can see what we have to work with. Remember that these are taken by me with a phone so are at wonky angles and have reflected light etc but hopefully you can see the basics.
Can you get the pictures taken outdoors?
IMO most pictures of things are better in natural light.
it's a bit dark outside
I always wait for an overcast day.
If indoors:
Wall facing the window.
Light sources at 45' to painting.
Tripod and timer.
But if you can wait overcast day or lee shadow of a building.
Anyway, thats my method.
Do this a little bit at work to help students put together portfolios. I use an easel to put the pictures on and a dslr on a tripod with a shutter release. I get best results with a longer lens, or at least not a wide angle up close. Def don’t use an onboard flash. I use a couple of strobe flashes with soft boxes. Either side. You could probably mock up something similar with conventional lights diffused somehow. It very easy to not get consistent lighting across the image, especially if the painting is large. White balance is also really important with photographing art. If you can get a white balance card to set up that would help. At the very least go into camera settings and make sure the wb settings matches the light source. Focus in manual not auto - much less faff.
And shoot in Raw if you can to give yourself the most opportunity to sort in post process.
Also forgot...used a Polaroid filter for some work, especially acrylics. Got to be careful not to completely flatten texture though.
My dad who is a photographer said to me outdoors on an overcast day (as above) I prefer outdoors in full sun.
Outdoors is great if it is not raining etc. What about backgrounds?
I have just converted my attic to a studio which has two Velux windows, two LED strips for general lighting and four spots that can be pointed at one wall that appear to give a great deal of white light with no shadows or real direction*.
*Not sure if that is the right word but you cannot see any bright points or obvious source. A bit like reflected light I guess.
My hope it to use the white wall with all the light on it.
Thoughts?
I would crop out all backround.
I think its a lot of trial and error. You should be fine indoors with the light but worth taking aome outdoors to see if it suits your paintings better. One of mine taken outside in sun:
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I agree with convert.
You are looking to achieve as even a light as possible all over the picture.
Hence the overcast day.
More likely the two or three flashes but diffused.
I haven't done it properly ever, but have spoke to a photographer and he said the same as convert.
I have done some shots that weren't quite right, but didn't need to make them perfect.
Also agree with the tripod, shutter release etc etc.
Good advice.
Flat light, i.e. an overcast day, will give you the most saturated colours and most even lighting with little or no reflection. Strong, direct light will give you the most detail but can wash out colour or else change the way it looks. You will also get reflections and hot spots in terms of blowing out the highlights. If you're going to photograph in strong external sunlight, find somewhere that is shaded like the side of a building or a porch way. That will give you the best results.
Longer lenses will give a flatter perspective and so are better than shorter focal lenght lenses. There is a specific type of lens for this sport of thing, often referred to as Makro Planar, which simply refers to the lens construction, which is designed with reproducing flat planes like text or art work with as much fidelity as possible.
And yes, exposure in RAW rather than JPEG as this gives you a much larger bandwidth of data and allows for much greater lattitude in post production.
Rather than try to photograph the piece (like a facsimile of the original), do it more low fi and natural which then gives a bit more flexibility for them not to be perfect.
Like this kind of thing (although this is a crap example)
I have just converted my attic to a studio which has two Velux windows, two LED strips for general lighting and four spots that can be pointed at one wall that appear to give a great deal of white light with no shadows or real direction*
Nope, that’s 3 mixed sources all with different colour temperatures plus bulbs often have colour spikes in them which will throw the colours off.
Shoot them against white or neutral grey and use flash or tungsten lights that match each other or diffuse daylight if you don’t have budget for lights. A colour checker (Gretag Macbeth X-Rite) is a handy tool for colour balance
A colour checker (Gretag Macbeth X-Rite) is a handy tool for colour balance
Whilst we have you and since you know about these things, I often use a grey card (18% grey) to set the white balance manually but I still find that the results are not quite right. Is that just me expressing a personal preference for either warm or cool tones and hues or is there something else going on?
Okay, here is a photo with the painting in the planned location for the future pictures.
It is only with a Samsung S8 phone and no tripod.
The wall behind is pure brilliant white and freshly painted. To the naked eye it looks a nice clean bright white. The photo has had no editing to change the colours or balance.
I guess that by playing with the hanging position I can get rid of the shadow on the right. Some kind of mirror / uplighter to get rid of the shadow below?
I hope the tripod and careful camera positioning will keep the painting square in the picture. It is flat against the wall.
I get the 'do it outside' idea but want to keep the background neutral and don't have anywhere convenient.
Other suggestions welcome.
or is there something else going on?or is there something else going on?
Yes because that grey (equal RGB tones) is not the same as a multi colour card with known values and profiling software to map that to a sensors spectral sensitivity (which is not linear or chromatically correct). I sort of know in theory how it works but I have no desire to run a system for art repro or cultural/museum archive.
There are lots of expensive bits of kit and software out there to do that.
Like you I take pictures of things and make the final image how I like it which is hardly ever ‘accurate’.
When it comes to indoor lighting make sure you're not using low CRI sources, might seem white and colour balance will work out fine but the colours of the painting will be washed out. Here's an exaggerated comparison between low/high cri sources, albeit with different tints.
Well I tried I suspect my CRI's were a bit low.
Click to view
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