Photographing Your Art: See Your Weatherman!

Photographing your art is one of the more challenging aspects of producing (and, it’s hoped, selling) your art. If you’re like me, you don’t have tons of money to throw at photographers to shoot your finished paintings. But, if you have some knowledge of cameras and lighting, you can do most of your photography for your fine art website or art-show submissions yourself.

You will find many differing opinions of how you should be photographing your work, and I’m here to tell you the correct way! Getting studio lighting right so that it won’t make hot spots or color casts that are way off is a problem that has dogged me (and myriad photographers). In the studio I have used a *fairly* sophisticated setup of 2 spotlights with diffusers and a digital SLR to get my shots, but this process is still fraught with often-unsatisfactory results. So, like most of the solutions to problems one encounters in art, I suggest you go back to nature. The standard for viewing art is under daylight. Daylight is basically sunlight, minus any color added by reflection or filtering.

Here is the quickest and simplest way to take photos of your art that are undistorted and mostly color-accurate:

1) Shoot you paintings outdoors on an easel with your camera on a tripod perpendicular to the painting’s surface. Make sure you line up your camera so that it is perpendicular to the center of your artwork’s surface plane. This will lessen distortion caused by perspective. If your camera has a zoom lens move your tripod back and zoom in. Fill the frame with your art. This will reduce edge distortion that is caused by the wide angle setting that most point-and-shoot cameras default to.

2) Do not photograph your work in direct sunlight — it is too warm and way too bright. Also, direct sunlight on your painting will yield a much-too-warm image.

3) Do not shoot in the shade on a sunny day either — the light you are recording is reflected/filtered by the sky and will make your images much too blue.

4) The best source of clean diffuse daylight is the sky on a BRIGHT, but OVERCAST day. The light will be subdued, so, not too harsh. The clouds will neutralize much of the blue cast of a clear sky. These days are not super-rare. Save up your painting photography and keep your eyes open for these weather conditions. If you don't believe me, wait for one of these days, go outside, and look at items in the landscape whose local color is white, gray, or black (houses painted flat white, gray rocks, black or gray asphalt. You will see that any color cast that sunlight or blue sky might produce to your eye, is suddenly gone. That is what you want. You want the camera to read the paint on your painting.

For me, photographing my art is never fun, but it can be kept fairly simple, leaving me time to do what I want to be doing — painting!