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How to Photograph Art

Kathy Boortz - Owl (detail)

Note the baby owls in the mother's wing. Shot outdoors in
open shade, then subtly adjusted in Photoshop.

Story + Photographs by J R Compton

Other Light   My usual photo procedure  

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.
 

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.
 

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 any 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 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 Egret shot at the correct setting for light bulbs,
I used the night before at Big As Night in Oak Cliff.

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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Oshelle

This shot was done with two household bulbs in reflectors on stands. One high and on the right filling in some of the shadows and casting the partial light on the background, and the other close in and on the left, creating the bright highlights on the upper edges of the blades. I disappeared most of the pedestal in Photoshop. The green background color is specific to Joel Cooner Gallery, for which I photographed this image. Most of the photos there are mine.

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.

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 two lights I use around till everything looks good on the camera's LCD.

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.



Elisabeth Schalij - Money Seeds
monoprint with chine colle - 20 x 16 inches
photographed in direct sunlight in my driveway

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 ripplish texture. Worse, many camera autofucus 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 later 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 - Potted Plant - acrylic on canvas
shot indoors under a fluorescent light with the white balance carefully adjusted

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 weather. Often it's more comfortable or convenient to shoot indoors.

When I photograph Arty 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.
 


ISO and Visual Noise

This section is new in early July 2008.

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 Tre Roberts in my front window for lots of sunlight

I often use DFine with the full-blown (and expensive) $636 version of Photoshop, but there are other noise-reduction programs that work with other programs. Photoshop Elements is a good, inexpensive — about $80 — 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.

Very possibly the best and cheapest generally-available digital camera for photographing art — and probably other uses is the Canon A720-IS. I've been thinking about getting one, primarily to carry in a borrowed kayak to photograph birds on the lake, in a waterproof plastic case that Canon makes for about $170. Because it's so small and works well even at higher ISOs, I could stick it in a pocket and use it anywhere. It doesn't hurt that it has a 1:6 zoom lens. Various cheapness factors render it less than ideal for some uses, but it is widely available at under $200. I don't own any stock in Canon. In fact, I've been a Nikon guy since the early 70s.



Marty Ray - Coffee Break, 1998
White stoneware and black slip
14 x 6.5 x 6.5 inches

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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.
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 have to read lens tests to learn this.)
5. Put the camera on a tripod, so it is level and aimed at the center of whatever flat art or slightly above for whatever 3-D art.
6. If using a zoom lens, set it mid-range, so the spatial distortion created by all 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 relatively the same place, so the camera does not have to be moved around. An easel can be helpful. The image at the top of this page was shot leaning on a fence. So were all the other shots in that shoot in Greg's back yard.

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Some photographic rules

Yes, rules are made to be broken, but it's easier if you know them, so you can break them more intelligently.

• When photographing 3-D work, use a neutral gray background (avoid bright colors or black when shooting light, metallic or otherwise reflective art. Film and digital media can only duplicate a limited tonal range.
   
• For 2-D work, it's better if the background (behind the art work.) is black, because that lets viewers — curators, jurors, etc. — focus on the art. Do not include the mat or frame, so the image appears larger, and those brighter elements do not distract from the art
  
  With digital, you can add it later, but it's more difficult and takes more time.
  
  With film, you'll either have to use felt or a velvet-like material that does not reflect light or paint a wall or large-enough piece of wood flat black.
  
  Or crop the slide image with metallic tape (that you've scrupulously kept clean, so dust and other jaggies don't intrude into your slide image).
   
• If the art is translucent (light passes through it) — like glass, film or sheer material, photograph it with light passing through it.

  • The light source should be behind the art (but not visible to the camera)
  •  That light source should be the same color as the light illuminating the rest of the art
  • Don't let anything else show through the translucent parts, unless you really want them visible
  • Be sure all the lights used are the same color

• Put the camera on a tripod.
• If you don't have a tripod, borrow one. This is important. Tripods don't just hold the camera steady. They also hold it in the same place, which can be helpful when shooting more than one piece of art that's the same or a similar size.
• Make sure the camera is steady

  • use a self-timer, if it's available.
  • don't touch the camera while it's shooting
  • or walk around if your floor shakes
   
• Use the smaller apertures (bigger f numbers — on the f/8 - f/22 end of the lens' range) and longer shutter speeds. Most lenses give their best quality when stopped down two to three f/stops. This slight adjustment can make a big difference in resolution, color, focus and apparent sharpness. Read camera and lens tests to learn the optimum aperture of your lens.
   
• If you're shooting Outdoor film (Daylight), don't illuminate your art with light bulbs or fluorescent lights. You may not be able to tell the difference, but your film or digital camera will.
   
• If you're shooting Tungsten film (Indoor or "Type B"), don't let daylight seep onto or reflect into the subject.
   
• Check exposure on the art itself — make sure the meter doesn't "see" the white mat or dark background.

  • If you have a gray card (18% reflectance) or or something in a medium green (grass, outside), use that to make a substitute reading, but be sure it is in the same light and facing the camera the same way your art does.
  • to determine correct exposure, point your camera or light meter at a medium gray object.
    • If you point the light meter at a white object, the object will be underexposed
    • If you point the light meter at a dark object, the object will be overexposed.
  • Move the camera closer to the work to check the exposure
    
• Make sure rectangular work — like paintings and photos — are straight, and the whole surface is in focus.

  • Don't let them tilt.
  • Photoshop and some other software can correct for unstraight, sometimes even tilted art, but if part of the image is out of focus, it cannot be saved.
    
• Focus, focus, focus.