IT'S A SNAP

Photographing paintings and drawings can be complicated or simple. This is a simple way.

Out Like A Light
Illuminating artwork is the most difficult part of photographing it. Glare, reflections, shadows, and color distortions need to be minimized.

Glare is the artist-photographer’s enemy. It has grossly distorted the color of this painting and made it difficult to fully appreciate.

The best kind of lighting is the sun, since incandescent and fluorescent light alter color. Choose an overcast day or a shaded area. Keep your painting away from anything that may reflect its own color onto the picture, such as a red brick wall. Also make sure your painting is not facing a bright, reflective surface, such as that white, metal-walled warehouse across the street.

This artist has found an ideal location in a well-shaded alley with minimal potential for glare on the surface of the painting. Note the neutral color of the paving and building walls.

Glare can be reduced or even eliminated with the help of a polarizing filter that screws onto the camera’s lens. A polarizing filter has a rotatable ring that, when rotated to the best orientation, makes glare disappear. (Camera settings must be made with the polarizing filter mounted if reliable results are to be obtained.)

The rich colors of sky and landscape that had been washed out by glare are now fully revealed with the help of a polarizing filter.

Keep the background simple. People want to see your painting, not your lovely rose bush. A plain, gray wall is ideal, but any neutral tone will do. If you don’t have one of those, tack up a piece of fabric, a sheet of cardboard, or a sheet of foam board behind your artwork. If you want a black backdrop for slides, use black velvet, which reflects no light.

Orient the picture to minimize glare or uneven lighting. Stand back from the painting and squint to better see any hot spots. Once satisfied, take your shot.

Take A Shot
The camera must remain absolutely immobile when shooting your picture. Use a tripod if you have one, or set the camera on a stable surface. Do not hand-hold the camera unless you want blurry photographs.

To ensure that you end up with a sharp, blur-free image, use a tripod or set your camera on a steady, stable surface.

Adjust the angle of the camera or picture so that they are parallel to one another in both vertically and horizontally directions. Otherwise, keystoning will result. Keystoning means that the artwork in your photo appears narrower at one end than at the other. Image editing computer software now makes it possible to correct many defects in digital photographs, including keystoning. Keep in mind, however, that reshaping the photograph to compensate for keystoning – however modest the adjustment may be – still results in mild distortion. When keystoning is severe and the adjustment radical, distortions become obvious. Therefore it is wise to avoid the need for editing as much as possible by setting up your camera and painting carefully to start with.

The set-up for this photograph was very poor, resulting in severe keystoning.

To check for potential keystoning, look through your camera’s viewfinder. The edges of the picture should line up with the viewfinder’s frame. If one end of the artwork appears more narrow than the other, either the camera or artwork must be tilted differently.

For instance, if the top of the image is more narrow than the bottom, it means the top of the painting is farther from the lens than the bottom and must be tipped forward slightly.

Expose Yourself
In order for the photograph to be the right value (i.e. not too dark and shadowy, and not overly pale and bleached), lens opening and shutter speed must be set appropriately.

Do not trust the automatic features of your camera for this purpose. Camera settings for landscape photographs, for example, are based on the assumption that 40% of the frame is darkish green grass, and 60% is occupied by a bright blue sky. Other options are meant to accommodate specific situations, such as back-lit and portrait. None of these is suitable for taking a reading directly from the artwork. Instead, you should set up your camera for daylight shooting and take a reading from a gray card. This is simply a piece of cardboard of a specific shade of gray. You can obtain one from a camera shop.

To determine what the correct exposure should be (a combination of shutter opening size and exposure time), use a gray card. Laid across the gray card shown here are a strip of color control patches (for accurate editing and reproduction of colors) and a grayscale (to facilitate adjustment of values) that would be photographed along with the painting or drawing.

In using a gray card, set it in front of the center of your picture. Focus the camera on it and let the internal meter take a reading to set confirm the “white balance” of a digital camera. Once set, you can take pictures of several paintings or drawings in succession unless the lighting changes, such as when clouds move in and reduce the amount of sunlight. If something of this sort occurs, you must reset the white balance before continuing to shoot pictures.

Note how a lack of a white balance setting (top) or an incorrectly chosen setting (middle) can result in color distortion. The true-to-life colors of the photograph at bottom were made possible by setting the white balance properly with a gray card.

Even with the use of a gray card, it is prudent to “bracket” your photographs. To bracket, shoot one picture according to the white balance setting, then take four or more additional exposures with slight modifications to the settings as follows.

• Increase exposure time or lens opening 1/2 step
• Increase exposure time or lens opening a full step
• Decrease exposure time or lens opening 1/2 step
• Decrease exposure time or lens opening a full step

The center photograph was taken with settings determined by the camera’s meter. At left is a longer exposure (more light), and at right a shorter exposure. The three bracketed images allow the artist to choose the one that most accurately resembles the original subject.

With several photographs to choose from, each with slightly different light settings, you are more likely to get at least one in which the colors of the photograph are close to the actual colors of the painting.

Lots of Bits
Always set your camera to the highest resolution possible so that they can be reproduced effectively in printed materials such as exhibit invitations. Galleries and juried exhibitions also frequently require that you submit high resolution images.

After you have photographed your artwork, make duplicate copies of the images for the purpose of doing touch-up work on the copies; retain the original “raw” images as well. Once an image has been edited, a low resolution copy can be made for use in emails or on a web site.

Fix It Up
A digital camera is more forgiving than one that uses film. Actually, a digital camera plus image editing software on your computer is more forgiving than film.

     Photoshop (splash screen at left) is a powerful but costly image editing software program. Gimp (program window with logo on the right) is available as a free, down-loadable file and includes all the features the average artist needs to adjust photographs of artwork.

Poor digital photographs can never be made great, but they can be made better with image editing software. Blurriness can be reduced, keystoning eliminated, color adjusted, and brightness corrected. What can’t be done is the removal of glare or reflections.

Photoshop is a powerful and well-known program made for professionals. Nothing so elaborate is needed to edit your photos. A good program that provides all the tools and features you might want, including support for Photoshop filters, is GIMP. GIMP is available as a free, down-loadable file from the Internet.



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THE BEST ART LESSON EVER

Every year, thousands of people enroll in art programs with the hope of becoming artists. They look to their instructors to guide them in everything from the right way to hold a brush (there is no right way) and what style of drawing is best (no one style is better than any other), to what colors to include on their palettes (a personal choice).

No person can teach another how to be an artist; we each teach ourselves.

The main things an art instructor can teach are technical skills. These includes things like perspective, color theory, chiaroscuro, anatomy, compositional structures, and the like. At best, an instructor can familiarize you with possible strategies for creating a painting, print, drawing, or sculpture. What cannot be taught is how to actually paint, print, draw, or sculpt. The way to learn to do those things is to actually do them…a lot. Practice your craft constantly, especially drawing. Keep your mind open to every possibility, including those that seem strange, alien, and even repugnant. Try every material and technique, both the conventional and unconventional. Teach yourself not only about art, but about as many other things as you possibly can: philosophy, literature, science, music, history, and the nature of human beings and the universe in which we live. Be curious; ask and read about everything. It is true that artists live, breathe, and eat art, but art alone can’t sustain us or give us things to make images of and about. The world around us gives us that.

Study art that others have made thousands of years ago, in recent centuries, and last week. Watch other artists at work and see what they do; ask questions. Steal ideas, styles, and techniques from other artists when it is useful to do so. Anything not worthy of immediate theft, keep reserved in your mind for tomorrow, when it may merit stealing.

Find your own solutions to creative problems. Don’t clutch at your teacher’s hand like a toddler and expect the teacher to make your pictures for you. Make them yourself, and don’t be afraid to make them badly. You will make tons of bad pictures before you make a single good one. And, the good one you make today will look bad tomorrow. If it doesn’t, it means you haven’t progressed.

In the end, it is you who will transform yourself into an artist through hard work; perseverance; exercising your mind, eyes, and hands; and by having it in you to become an artist. When you become one, you will know it with quiet certainty. If you have not yet become an artist, you will puff yourself up and boast that you are a great artist.

When you reach that pinnacle of being an Artist, it will be your profession and you will treat it as one in the same way that an electrician, doctor, teacher, or store manager does. Like them, you will not wait for inspiration or for the “mood to strike” before you go to work. You will go to work when it is time to do so each day because it is your job. And, when need be, you will work overtime even when exhausted. You will recognize that being an artist is not some exalted position and you are not a V.I.P., a celebrity, or superior to other human beings in any way merely by virtue of being an artist. You will learn that being an artist is a dignified and demanding pursuit on a level with any career, and you will wear the mantle of Artist with humility.

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TURN ON THE LIGHT

The ideal studio light is glare-free, provides ample illumination, and does not distort color. For centuries that has been the sun.

Don’t Jump!

Artists who paint by natural light have long favored north facing windows. Northern light is indirect and without glare. Plus, its color and intensity tend to remain constant throughout the day. Studios facing other directions are subject to changing light conditions due to the shifting position of the sun.

Brilliant sunlight is calmed down with the help of solar shades on covering the windows of this breakfast nook. Shades like these can help the artist in his or  her studio. 

With non-north facing windows, the sun shines directly into the window at least part of the day. Solar shades, made of a meshed material, reduce glare and harshness. I use heavy white fabric for the same purpose.

Jump Forward

Artificial light must be used by those who paint at night or have studios lacking adequate natural light.

Ordinary incandescent light bulbs produce yellowish light and glare. “White” or “cool” incandescent lights are an improvement, but still are not perfect. To minimize glare, avoid overhead fixtures or lights aimed at your painting area. Instead, bounce the light from flood lamps off the walls and ceiling. Inexpensive clamp-on flood lamps may be found at stores like Home Depot.

Inexpensive clamp-on lights like this one can be found at hardware stores. They can be mounted almost anywhere. Easily adjustable, direct their light so it bounces off walls and ceiling to illuminate your work space with non-glare indirect light.

Energy Saver light bulbs are a step up from traditional incandescent lights. Not only do they reduce electric consumption, but glare is diminished and the “cool light” type emits light closer to the color of daylight. Although more expensive to purchase than incandescent light bulbs, they last considerably longer and use much less electricity. For the artist, they offer the additional bonus of virtually glare-free light.

Although more expensive to purchase than traditional incandescent light bulbs, Energy-saver bulbs last a long time and end up saving money by consuming less electricity. They produce relatively little glare, and are available in both warm-light and cool-light versions. The cool-light type gives off light that is similar to the color of natural daylight.

Color-corrected fluorescent fixtures are the best solution for those who must work by artificial light. Glare is minimal, colors look true, and illumination is plentiful. Sunlight, daylight, and color-corrected are some of the terms used to label fluorescent bulbs that emit light at a temperature similar to natural daylight (5500° K). They are available in many configurations and sizes, including energy saving types.

Color corrected flourescent bulbs can be installed in existing fixtures to produce relatively glare-free light with a color similar to that of daylight. The ones shown here are mounted in their own free-standing fixture that can be placed at any convenient location.

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