Art and photos

Posted by Sara Gettys on Nov 24, 2011 | Comments Off

Making art is fun. Making photos is fun. Making photos of your art is not nearly as fun.

Just as photo contests have changed in the last five years from requiring tearsheets — the physical newspaper clipping of the photo — to digital submissions, art submissions to galleries and contests has also changed from the actual pieces, or slides, to digital files. And while artists are saving a little cash of the purchase of slide film, I know many many who are frustrated by the struggle to either make good pictures of their own art, or having to pay someone to photograph their art for them.

Today I finished up framing my own work for a show and needed to shoot it for my own records. Usually, I do this outside in open shade, find a place in the yard where the light is nice and even, and go at it. Unfortunately, it was wet, windy and generally not great photo weather out today, so I had to come up with an alternative. I wanted to post this here for all of you who might be struggling to shoot your own work, and also say that these tips could be used to elevate your photography of other inanimate objects.

First, I picked a spot that had nice even window lighting, not too directional. I didn’t want harsh shadows. I turned off all the lights, which are a mix of tungsten lighting (which has a yellow cast), compact flourescent (which can yellow or green or blue) and mini-halogen lights in the kitchen (yikes). While you might feel like you need lots of light, having a bunch of different colors of light will do all sorts of terrible things to the colors in your paintings. By turning the lights off, I ensured I’d only be dealing with one color of light — the light coming in through the window. Usually shade has a blueish cast that you can eliminate by setting your camera’s white balance to shade, but I wasn’t fully satisfied with that after a few test shots, so after reading the camera manual a few times, I figured out how to manually set the white balance on my camera. This is important, as I’m trying to create the most realistic documentation of my work to later submit to contests. While you can always play around with the white balance a bit in Photoshop, it never looks as good as it does if you just get it right the first time.

Then I put my camera on a tripod. I wanted to shoot with an aperture of f8 or more to ensure the whole surface of the painting would be sharp. I was using a bit of a zoom, which tends to make for a more shallow depth-of field. Because I was stopped down to f8, and using ISO 400 so I wouldn’t have any noise problems, my shutter speed was at an 8th of a second — too slow for me to hand-hold the camera.

I used a chair to hold the paintings. While the smaller ones would sit up on their own, I used a rolled-up towel to prop the larger ones up. My goal was to keep the surface parallel to the focus plane of the camera — basically have the camera and painting parallel so that when I want to crop to the edge of the painting, the edges of the painting are as close to square as I can get them. It helped that my viewfinder has some guides, which I used to see if everything was square before shooting.This would have been easier if I’d had a wall to hang things on, but you just make do with what you’ve got.

Finally, I used the timer to for the shutter. Because the shutter speed was so slow, I didn’t want to risk shaking the camera with my hand when I hit the shutter.

So that’s my process. It’s not very fancy, but even doing a few simple things can really help do justice to the work you’ve spent a lot of time on.