If your art involves color, shape, dimension or texture, direct sunlight is the best light source, and it is widely available on this planet. Not talking about full — or open — shade (illuminated by the overly blue sky above), not dappled light (like from a tree's varying shadows), not overcast sky light (when the sun goes behind a cloud), but direct light beamed down 93 million miles from our local star.

Direct sunlight, however, is not always available, and other natural and unnatural light sources have their qualities, too. (See Other Light, below.) They're just not as good nor cheap nor easy to deal with as the light from the sun.
 

Fill the frame

Whatever size your camera's sensor or film is, from one of the dinky ones on an under $100 Point & Shoot to the much larger sensors on an expensive digital Single Lens Reflex (or even larger and much more expensive, larger format cameras), if you fill the frame with your piece of art — get close enough so the art almost fills the viewfinder — you'll make the best use of whatever resolution your camera has.

If it's not part of the art, the background is unimportant. You should minimize the area around the art. Let it go white, black or gray, whichever looks best. If that area is colorful, the colors will detract from your art. Of course, you can always re-frame the image in Photoshop or other image software.

Five megapixels is plenty. Between about 8 and 12 megapixels, very few people can tell the difference. My old Sony has 5 megapixels; my Canon has 8 and my latest Nikon has 12 megapixels. I can barely tell the differences, even blown up on a big monitor, though I could probably tell those from a 48-megapixel image, in those few cases when megapixels aren't just hype.
 

Elisabeth Schalij   Red Cactus   2008
oil on canvas   11 x 14 inches  

Photographed under tungsten lights on a wall in a gallery.

Focus

Nothing can save it if you don't get the image in focus. Check and double-check apparent sharpness. If your digital camera will let you, magnify the image at least 5 times (5x). Some amateur cameras may not zoom that far, but if it's sharp blown up 3 - 5 times, it'll be probably be sharp enough.

Also realize that some cameras will magnify (zoom into) images so much that everything looks out of focus, even when they are sharp. Experience should be your guide; it helps to know your camera. My DSLR lets me blow images up to 20 times their size, and at that size, it can be very confusing. If I tap the enlarge-image button only 5, not the full 8 times, I get a better idea of what's actually sharp. Your camera may vary.

Also be aware that the LCDs on the back of most cameras show images at much higher contrast than they really are. The unmagnified image usually looks sharp, and that can mislead you. Zoom in to be sure.

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Color

We think of sunlight as yellow, because we think the sun is yellow. But it isn't. The light it shines is blue because our sun burns blue hot (about 6,000 degrees Kelvin). We usually do not notice the color of sunlight because it is the light we expect. Our brains automatically adjust for the differences from one light source color to another, but film and digital cameras do not.

If you use light other than the mid-day (approximately 10 am till 4 pm) sun, precisely rendered colors are less likely. Early morning, late afternoon and evening sunlight is redder, and as lovely as that is, it is not much good for photographing art.

Under midday direct sunlight, colors are easy. Most film and nearly all digital cameras (unless set otherwise) expect and assume sunlight. If you use something else, it is guesswork. Anything but sunlight tends to be confusing to both users and cameras/film.

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Nancy Cole - Trinity Turtles - earthenware - MAC Member Show 06
 

As I photographed the turtles under incandescent lights — too red.  Right: as I Photoshopped it using masking, levels, other tricks. The base and background should be neutral, so I kept tweaking it. It might be that I made it too green, and not yellow enough.

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Adjusting what we see as white

Thank goodness for digital cameras with adjustable White Balance settings.*

I won't buy one without, because I shoot under a variety of light sources, only some of which I have control over. I had to wait six months five years ago to get my Sony F707, which had that feature.

Unfortunately, not many digital cameras have manual White Balance, and most automatic White Balance features on digital cameras (including expensive ones) don't work well under all lights. You still have to check feature lists carefully.

My expensive camera allows me to make color balance adjustments for a variety of light sources, so I can dial the exact color in degrees Kelvin for almost any kind of a source (halogen, fluorescent or tungsten bulb, lamp, candle or sunlight under differing circumstances), but it's still iffy with mixed light sources, and its automatic white balance fares poorly (goes reddish) with ordinary light bulbs. Canon cameras are especially bad at correcting for light bulbs.

Mixed lighting — like in galleries with big windows and light bulbs can vary by the inch from warm to cool, and homes with mixed light can be a challenge to adjust to. Sometimes I can set the camera before I shoot. Sometimes I can change the color in Photoshop later. Sometimes I can't do either.
 

White Great Egret shot at the setting for light bulbs I had used the night before
 

Mixing light colors is a hassle. If you are shooting "indoor" film or digital with indoor lights, and there is an unblocked window letting in outside light (which is probably brighter than anything indoors) so it can shine on or reflect in your art, some or all of your art may be rendered blue instead of the color you expect. Not a major problem with digital (if you know how to use masking in an image manipulation program), but tough luck on film.

If you shoot art inside or near color objects, those objects' color(s) can reflect in the art. I love my Parrot Green (It feels warm in winter and cool in summer.) living room, but I know better than to photograph art there, because when I did, the green walls turned it a sickly shade. Our brains adjust. Cameras and film don't.

Colored walls and ceilings are prime suspects for color shifts, but if you have a big red couch where it can reflect in your art, it can make your art pink. Even outside, a big green tree, a bright yellow garage or red bricks can alter color subtly or substantially. The blue paint on the ceiling of your porch can ruin warm hues.

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Digital Vs. Analog

Before we jump into this century, which will eventually be all digital and is already rushing headlong in that direction, remember: If you need a lot of slides quickly, shoot slide film. It's generally cheaper.

But if you want to save your images in their true colors for a long, long time, forget film. Film fades. Film colors change according to temperature, humidity, storage methods and materials, time and the type of light used to view them. Slides can be made from digital images at any time in their long life cycle and still be great.

Fluorescent lights are especially dangerous to photographic prints as well as offset (printing press) printing and ink jets, too.

Properly stored digital images, however, will last centuries. A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a digital image file is identical to its original. The first and every subsequent copy of a digital file remains the same.

The first and every subsequent analog copy of a color slide or print or negative will be different. Slightly at first, but after generations of analog copies of copies, your image can become unrecognizable.

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Dayak Dragon   wood carving with polychrome pigment
 

This shot was illuminated with one household bulb in a reflector on a stand and one large white foam packing board to reflect that light into some of the shadows. The main light is almost directly above, only slightly to the left. The background was darkened in Photoshop, so the piece would look more dramatic. It was photographed with a Canon Powershot S5 IS camera on a tripod for Joel Cooner Gallery. I produce that site and shoot most of its photos.
 

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The importance of shadows

Shadows are important to our perception of art, and not just for sculpture. Two or three or more lights illuminating artwork tends to either multiply or eliminate the shadows, including shadows that show us brushstrokes, subtle and overt textures, crinkles and creases, tears, cuts, protrusions, layers, etchings and other dimensional aspects.

Orient your art so sunlight falls on the top, and your art will likely look like it should and show the textures and colors you put into it, and more closely approximate the actual piece than any other lighting source can.

If you use two or more light sources of equal intensity, texture is more difficult, and all those shadows can confuse viewers.

For three-dimensional art, use a stronger light (neither of them has to be very bright if you use longer exposures and keep the camera steady) to illuminate your art and a less intense bulb (or more distant equal bulb, or white or silver reflector or fill-in flash) to fill in the shadows.

Hundreds of books explain the basics of multi-light setups for three-dimensional objects. I learned commercial lighting at East Texas State University (back when it was still called that) in the 1970s, but I usually wing it now, moving the one light I haven't knocked over and broken with various reflectors until it looks good on the camera's LCD, then I adjust significantly in Photoshop.

If you are new to this, don't try to judge it with your eyes. Look at the camera's LCD, which shows much higher contrast. LCDs make judging light evenness easy.
 

Alex Troup - Zooamorph, 1988
mixed media with butterfly, beetle,
wasp nest, cork, feathers and newsprint
10 x 32 x 4 inches
 

If your work is in a frame or mat, be careful. Those protrusions may create shadows down and perhaps into your art. If your work is already framed or matted, tilt the artwork back toward the sun and shoot down on it from an angle, so that the back of the camera parallels the artwork to render it rectilinearly correct. A little mat or frame shadow can be helpful (to show that it is matted or framed), but a lot can get in the way.

If you take your art to a Service Provider, they will probably use more than one light — maybe four — to evenly illuminate your artwork. Very nice for art that is high-contrast and physically flat, but problematic for creating a precise likeness of art that involves color, shape, dimension or texture.

Here on Earth we have one local star (the sun), so we are used to seeing things with only one set of shadows. Our brains expect it that way. We accept as realistic objects that cast their shadows down and slightly to the right. Slightly to the left doesn't thwart that expectation much and may be unavoidable. But shadows cast to the right (not at all down), left or (shudder) upward, tend to confuse our sense of depth.

Shadows and subtle tonalities are especially important when photographing sculpture, which needs to be immediately seen as three-dimensional. You do not have to use direct sunlight to show shadows and ranges of tonalities, but it helps.

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Glass is not clear.

Photographing art behind glass can be a challenge. Glass reflects light like a mirror. Sunlight outdoors or gallery lights indoors or your own cockamamie lighting setup anywhere in between may well reflect in the glass you put over your art. I have often accidentally included me in photographs of art behind glass or art that is glass.

The best way to photograph art behind glass is to take off the glass. If you can't get rid of the glass, light the art through the glass obliquely from the sides and shoot straight into the image while hiding the camera (everything but the lens) behind something soft, non-reflective and black. I sometimes use a large piece of black mat board with a circle cut out for my lens — or a dark towel or whatever else is available to hide reflections of me, my camera or my bright metal tripod.

Dual lighting tends to flatten out texture, shape and shadows, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

Glass steals focus and distorts your images. It is not clear. Sometimes — especially when it is lighted at angles — glass adds its own blue-green color and rippled texture. Worse, many camera auto focus systems focus on the first thing they're aimed at, not necessarily what you want in focus behind the glass.

If your glass is any distance from the surface of your art (and it often is) and your camera focuses on the glass, your art may may be rendered out of focus — soft and blurry looking.
 

Sonia King - Pathfinder - 24 karat gold pieces
 


Because this piece is so reflective, I had to shoot with a flash at an angle, then re-square it in Photoshop, per instructions below.
 

A quicker, easier shooting technique is to photograph the piece from an angle using direct flash. No tripod required.

Make sure no flash glare gets in the glass and that the entire piece is illuminated and in sharp focus, then square the work up in Photoshop or other software. It is helpful to make another photo directly into the piece (probably with the flash reflecting in it), so its correct proportions are known, because the relative dimensions are not necessarily obvious from the angled photo.

Glass flattens. If you take glass off thin or flimsy art, and you don't secure it to something to flatten it, the piece can bend or warp or ripple. Warped base mediums show shadows that probably should not be visible. 
 

Richard Ray    Near Oak Cliff, 2008   acrylic on canvas
 

Photographed in a frame leaning against a wall in Marty's studio under fluorescent ceiling lights, then worked on in Photoshop for about fifteen minutes. Almost every brushstroke shows.

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Other light

Sunlight is not perfect. Sometimes it rains or snows or is overcast or mostly cloudy. Sometimes the sky turns green and the sun disappears into tornadish clouds. Often it's more comfortable or convenient to shoot indoors.

When I photograph Marty and Richard Ray's latest art for their member pages every year (an event I eagerly look forward to), we set up in one end of Marty's studio under a fluorescent tube that shines down from the ceiling.

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ISO and Visual Noise

Film and other materials are rated by the International Standards Organization (ISO) according to their relative sensitivity to light. If you use film, use slow film to photograph art. If you use digital, set the camera to a low ISO setting.

We used to call this sensitivity "film speed" or "ASA" (American Standards Association), and it is still expressed as a number, with lower numbers indicating less sensitivity.

With either film or digital, the lower the speed, the lower the visual noise and the higher the contrast. Conversely, the higher the ISO, the higher the noise and the lower the apparent contrast. Grain looks like noise in the image. Fine grain looks better than coarse grain.

In film, visible grain was a clumping of light-sensitive silver halides suspended in the hardened gelatin of the film.

In digital, the same effect is caused by other factors, which can be somewhat controlled in PP (Post Production) via image-editing software or a plug-in. In digital that "graininess" is called visual noise, which comes in two varieties — color noise and contrast noise — with essentially similar results that look a lot like grain.
 

Left and right: Low (80) and high (1600) ISO — an extreme example to make a point. Spider & Skeleton art by my friend Tre Roberts in my front window for lots of sunlight
 

I often use DFine as a plug-in for the full-blown (and very expensive) version of Photoshop, but there are other noise-reduction plug-ins that work with other programs. Photoshop Elements is a good, inexpensive — about $70 — program that will probably suit your art-photographing needs at first. Using digital photographs without editing tends to look amateurish and does not show your art to its best advantage.

At the least, you should correct the tonal range, contrast, color saturation and composition of your images, although more discussion of those techniques is beyond the scope of this article.

80 or 100 is the lowest ISO available on most digital cameras. Some even very expensive digital cameras render images that are so noisy at any rating higher than 100, that they are unusable for photographing art. Although newer, better and only sometimes more expensive digicams can render images at higher ISO ratings very well.

I'll repeat: in general, it is best to use low ISO camera settings when photographing art. Putting the camera on a firm, secure tripod is also recommended.

There are inexpensive digital cameras whose features fit neatly into the categories I've (barely) outlined in this story. My favorite digital camera site tested nine cameras that cost less than $150 in November 2008, and that test, especially on its Conclusions & Ratings page at the end, Highly Recommends two cameras that would be ideal for photographing your art, if you don't already have or can't afford a more expensive one.

I have no financial stake in Digital Photography Review (although Amazon does), but it's the only online photography site I check every day, and I don't buy anything they don't recommend. I go through a lot of other websites about photography. The latest and greatest of those are linked on my personal Links page.
 

Cecilia Thurman    Fish Gotta Swim, 2009
oil on paper collage diptych   34 x 32 inches
 


We didn't want to take her big collages out from their glassed frames, so we photographed each piece standing in the grass of her brightly-sunlit backyard. One-by-one, we tilted them, aiming the glass so it would reflect only the dark shadows of a nearby garage.

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One Photoshop Tip

There are whole giant books and multi-semester classes on Photoshop — either the cheap Elements version or the big, expensive, professional, full-blown one. I'm going to assume you know almost everything you need to know about whichever version you use, and I won't talk about all that other stuff.

But one thing I know for certain is that you probably do not know the correct way to adjust Levels (command l in Mac; control l in PC — and yes, those are lower case Ls.), because most of the images I get from artists are incorrectly adjusted.

The correct way to adjust Levels is:

Correct Level Adjustment

This is ideal for most images, but you have some leeway.

The idea is to get that left, black triangle as close as possible to pointing up to the highest peak on the left of the graph.

That's the triangle that adjusts the shadow/darks of your image. There are images where this adjustment is too dark. In that case, adjust it back toward the left until you see exactly what you want in the image itself. But this is the correct starting point for the black triangle if you want your image to have dark darks and light lights.

You should probably know that it is impossible to include all the intermediate tones of a work of art in an image of it. We're just talking about making a reasonably accurate portrayal of your art. No digital copy of analog art is ever perfect.

According to the sign on my kitchen door, "perfection is unlikely."

If you want lighter grays (middle tones), move the middle, gray triangle toward the left. Darker to the right. Usually, however, you want to leave it right where it is.

There are other miracles that this Levels Adjustment provides, but you'll have to find them elsewhere.

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My photographic procedure

As elsewhere, when I'm in that little room in Marty's studio,
shooting his paintings or her pots, I:

1. Make certain only one light source affects what the camera sees. If you are using overhead lights, make sure the windows or doors don't let in day light.
2. Set the White Balance for the light source by filling the image view with white (I usually use a piece of typing paper.) and pushing the right buttons in the right sequence for the camera, or by setting the correct color balance via menu or dial.
3. Set the shutter speed and aperture combination indicated when an 18% gray card fills the image view.
4. Adjust the f-stop and shutter speed combination to an equivalent exposure, so the lens is set to its optimum optical quality aperture. You may have to read lens tests to learn this, but the optimum aperture is usually two stops down from maximum. So if you have an f/2.8 lens, click two clicks down to f/5.6, unless your art is three-dimensional and needs more depth of field.
5. Put the camera on a tripod, so it is level and aimed at the center of whatever flat art or whatever angle looks best for 3-D art.
6. If using a zoom lens, set it mid-range, so the spatial distortion created by zoom lenses is minimized.
7. Carefully align each image in the camera, so the sides are straight up and down, and tops and bottoms are level. Even if you cannot square all the lines, if the entire piece of art is in sharp focus, the image can be squared in Photoshop or other image manipulation software.
8. Activate the self-timer, so any motion from pushing the shutter button or you walking nearby is dissipated by the time the shutter actually goes off.
9. Shoot at least three shots of every piece — one shot at what the meter indicates is the correct exposure; one stop over-exposed; and at least one under-exposed — even if it looks great on the LCD. Dark art needs more exposure (wider apertures — smaller f numbers), and lighter work needs less (smaller apertures — bigger f numbers).
10. Playback images on the LCD often, to be certain they are in focus and the exposure is as close as possible to correct. If your camera lets you enlarge the image, do it.
11. Place each new piece to be photographed in as near as the same place you can, so the camera does not have to be moved around. An easel can be helpful, but a neutral background (a nail in a plain wall where you can hang art) is the best. None of the works on this page were shot in a studio. All used improvised lighting of some sort.

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Camera LCDs (liquid crystal display) can mislead. Because of their small size, low resolution, angle of view and construction, most digital camera LCDs show images that are too contrasty (so images look sharp and in focus, even when they are not), and it is often difficult to see detail.

Worse, many camera LCDs show colors or tonal ranges substantially different from how you will see the same images on your monitor or printed from your printer.

If you can just barely see the edges between the darker colors — especially in the black and magenta, your monitor is adjusted about as well as mine is, and mine is nearly perfect now, finally ...

Your monitor is calibrated, isn't it?

That's probably the only way you can half-way guarantee that what you see is essentially similar to what others will.

The color chart above can help you begin calibrating your monitor by setting the brightness to its maximum, then adjusting the contrast till you see the tonal range of all the colors, especially the magenta — but don't worry about the yellow.

You can use the software or instructions that came with your monitor, Adobe Gamma with its built-in step-by-step instructions, Macintosh's system software (I don't know about that other system.) or the controls built into your monitor (Dell, among others) — all of which can help you achieve the best and most accurate view on your monitor.

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Dean Corbitt - untitled, 2009
sewn paper collage 9 x 9 inches
 

I made the background white in Photoshop, so the threads would stand out.  

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Some photographic rules

In some digital cameras the image on the LCD can be zoomed or magnified, so we can check focus and details, but the LCDs on many cameras are too small for much precision or they do not accurately reflect tonal ranges. LCDs show images with a lot of contrast that makes even out of focus shots look good. If you can magnify the image, you'll see what the image is really like.

* = And, of course, Photoshop. Back to text.

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This page was seriously updated on June 24 2009.