how to photograph my small paintings

[mybike]

Hello eb
i have some small paintings made by me in acrylic, size small 10x15 or 13x18 all painted on canvass board.
i would like to create a web page with the related pics of each one of the paintings...
does anyone knows how to do it ? or give me some suggestions to take pics with good light? (in studio)
thanks a lot in advance

paolo

[kds315*]

Lefkowitz, Lester, "The Manual of Close-Up Photography", Amphoto N.Y., 1979, ISBN 0-8174-2130-0

[visualopsins]

[Orio]

hi Paolo
you need first to find which one of your lenses has the less gemoetrical distortion.
This is important if you don't want to have curved margins of the paintings.
You will need of course a tripod for the camera and one for the painting, unless you decide to shoot the painting on the floor, which can be difficult because of the shadows of the camera tripod.
You will need to set both tripods perfectly perpendicular to the ground by use of a bubble (spirit) level.
This way the lens will be perfectly perpendicular to the painting's surface.
You need to place camera's height according to the painting, the lens should aim to the perfect centre of the painting.
Since your camera and painting are perfectly aligned, you will not have to stop down much to ensure everything is in focus. Just stop down to what is the sweet spot of your lens (typically around f/5.6)
The best location to shoot your paintings is either outdoors in a cloudy day, or outdoors under a big tent (you dont need to buy one, you can build one by use of four tall poles on the top of which you secure the four corners of a large white cotton bed sheet (those for two places beds), or indoors in a room that is lightened indirectly (with lights pointing to the ceiling which reflects light back in a diffused way). Never use direct lights pointed to the painting.
If you shoot digital, have ready a large white cardboard to put in front of the painting, you will shoot it before every painting so you will have a white balance reference to use for doing correct RAW developing.
Always shoot RAW never JPG
To meter the light, do not use camera meter. Use hand held meter instead, and either measure incident light, or use a 18% grey card directly in front of painting to meter reflected light. This means of course you will have to use the camera in manual mode.
Other obvious suggestions: always remove any glass that might be in the paintings' frame, and never, ever use flash, because the surface of oil paints is reflective and you will never be able to avoid highlights reflections if you use flash. The best way is what I said before, that is ambient diffused light (either natural or continuous bulb).
hope this helps

[Seele]

I have done plenty of flat copy work over the years, here is the method I use for larger paintings, but can of course be scaled-down for smaller originals.

First I need to know the original is evenly lit. I use two photofloods, positioned to the left and right of the original at 45-degrees pointing at the middle, with the axes at the same height. To test for eveness, I use a small object like a roll of 120 film (you can use whatever is convenient, a BIC lighter, an AA-size battery or whatever), place it at the middle perpendicular to the original. If the original receives equal illumination from both photofloods, the two shadows would be the same in intensity, and if their positions are correct, both shadows would line up in a straight line. Make sure you place the lamps at fair distances away from the original to prevent hot spot in the middle.

The camera has to be positioned to have its optical axis perpendicular to the original and hits it at its dead centre. This can be a bit tricky to do, a method is to place a mirror at the middle and if you can see the camera lens in the mirror then you would be very close to the correct position.

Although the original is meant to be flat, oil and acrylic paintings are slightly three-dimensional, with plenty of inclined surfaces. While the lamps are positioned not to make reflections from the general flat surface of the painting, these small inclined surfaces would indeed produce reflections. As a rule, I place polarizing filters both on the lamps and the camera lens: the ones on the lamps are identically positioned, and the one on the lens positioned to give maximum polarization; this would get rid of all the reflections and bring out the true colours.

[poilu]

put them on flat scanner and scan

[mybike]

really thanks to eb! your' great to help me and i appreciate
all the methods are good , i think, i just try out one by on eto see which one gives the best perfromance for this purpose
just one more tip: the paintings are painted above the acryilic with a particular bright and trasparent paint to give more strenght to original dull acriylic colours. The only problem is that this can cause some reflections. do you think this fact is to be taken in account ?

[Seele]

Paolo,

The method I described using cross-polarized light would take away all the reflections.

There was only one occasions where my method did not work: on the painting itself there were metallic flecks embedded, and the polarized light took away the metallic look too. But if I did not use the polarizers, the painting surface would get covered in reflections; too bad the painter did not understand any of it

[F16SUNSHINE]

[xjjohnno]

Once you've sorted out the right lens for the job you might want to try some natural lighting, as in that lovely flat and minimal glare lighting you get on an overcast day. Years ago I used to do lighting for live music and occassionally integrate slide shows into the light shows with pictures sourced from magazines and similar glossy prints.

[ChrisLilley]

[visualopsins]

[ChrisLilley]

[ChrisLilley]

[visualopsins]