Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2010/11/11
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Pasvorn, I spent the last couple of day's taking pictures of my wife's artwork. She is a prize winning artist and the pictures are for a forthcoming book. Further, most art exhibits these days require the artist to submit entries for judging on CD in lieu of the actual artwork. Photographing art is more difficult than it appears. First, to avoid keystoning, the camera film plane and the painting must be absolutely parallel. Studios that do a lot of this work usually have a fixed setup with an easel fixed to one wall and the camera on a heavy tripod or suitable stand. It helps if the camera viewfinder can superimpose a grid on the image. Second, the lighting must be even on all sides of the painting. Fixed installations use strobes or floodlights on both sides or on four corners of the artwork, usually at a 45 degree angle so that specular reflection off the surface is not picked up by the camera lens. I use a pair of Olympus 310 strobe lights, one on either side of the painting, far enough away so that there are no hot spots. The lights have a remote switch, triggered by the flash from a tiny camera mounted strobe, so that I can move them around without tripping over the wires. Most paintings and collages, as opposed to prints, are not truly flat. They have surface irregularities, brush strokes, impasto effects, etc. You don't want to eliminate these entirely or you will lose the effect that the artist intended. For more casual work, I simply move the painting easel outside to a porch on the north side of the house and photograph the painting by diffuse skylight. This works as well for me as it did for French artists in a cheap loft in Paris. Be sure to adjust the white balance so that the picture looks natural. Third, make sure that the lens has little or no barrel or pincushion distortion. Most zoom lenses distort at their extreme focal lengths so position your camera so that you are using the sweet mid portion of the range. Or use a quality fixed focal length lens. The advantage of the zoom, of course, is that it permits you to vary the size of the image to reasonably fill the frame without moving the tripod. Finally, use an appropriate camera. Regardless of its other merits, an RF Leica is not the best choice for art photography. You need a good SLR or a DSLR, a reflex mid sized camera, or a view camera. For CDs a DSLR is satisfactory. Most exhibitions set a maximum size for judging and require JPEG format set for full screen viewing at 72 lpi. A 2 to 3 MB files size is all that is necessary. For publication, however, 300 lpi is required and the file sizes can range up to 20 or 30 MB. I'm sure that is more than you want to know. Larry Z - - - - - - John, Love the clickable. Simply beautiful. I have a question about lighting. What type of lighting do you use? I tried to take a picture of a painting the other day, and it does not come out well. -Pasvorn On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 5:25 PM, John Nebel <john.nebel at csdco.com> wrote: http://thangkas.csd.net/shakyamuni.html clickable for detail, C&C welcome John