More Thoughts on Photographing Your Art

"Teacup and Raspberries"
6 X 6
Oil on Panel
Click on picture to see auction.

I re-worked this painting a little.  I added more depth to the raspberries and some highlights on the leaves.  Here is the photo I took of it before.






As I was talking about in a recent post True Colors, I hope you can see the difference in the quality of the photo when I used the color card to color correct the photo.  It is really amazing to me how much of a difference color balancing has made.

Another issue with the old photo was the amount of glare I got.  Photographing dark wet paint is hard to do.  It would have been better to wait until the painting had dried to try and photograph it.  Just like the kids with their new tattoos who can't wait until the red irritated skin has subsided to show it off on facebook, I'm afraid I get in too much of a hurry at times.  Waiting to photograph paintings until they are dry does help with the overall quality.

Another thing I have done is to adjust my lighting.  I have tried to no avail to set up my lights at a perfect 45 degree angle.  I still get glare.  So what I did was point the lights at the ceiling and bounced the light off the ceiling.  This has helped a great deal in getting rid of glare.  The ceiling acts as a light diffuser.   I got the idea from the photography class I went to where he suggested bouncing the flash off the ceiling instead of off the people you are photographing to take out the harsh effects of the flash.

One other thing I thought of is to put double sided carpet tape both on the table surface and on the wall so I can stick my paintings up perpendicular to the table top.  No more leaning paintings and then trying to duplicate the angle with the camera.

So those are just a few of things I am trying out to improve the quality of the pictures I take of my art.  After posting the improved photo of this painting on Daily Paintworks, I had a bid in the first few hours.  Yea!


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Comments

  1. Thanks Karla,your tips are so helpful! I can see a great improvement in the photos! Congratulations on the bid!!

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  2. Photographing paintings can be a problem, I photograph dark paintings from further away then zoom in, this helps to cut glare, I also use 'gamma adjust' in my photo editing program to darken and get rid of glare then I can always brighten it if it has got too dark. Certain lamps can make the white look pink and daylight can blue everything too.

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