Photographing
art work
Paul Litherland
Paul Litherland is a photographer who specializes in the photography of art work. He is also an artist. Click here for a link to his art pages. He runs Studio LUX, a photography studio dedicated to beautiful photographic reproductions of art work. Visit the web page of Studio LUX.
Why should you photograph your work?
It is important to have good documentation of your artwork for a few of the
following reasons:
- submitting your artwork for exhibition proposals to artist run and commercial
galleries
- applying for artist project and research grants
- newspaper reviews and magazine articles. Newspapers may or may not send someone
to photograph your work. If you are able to supply an image, you have a much
better chance of having your work published. Taking the time to make good photographs
is always worth the trouble and expense. Poor photographs not only make it difficult
to see what the work is, they convey the idea that the artist doesn’t
care about the work.. It’s unfortunate that art cannot always be evaluated
in the original, but good slides or prints are a sign that you care about the
work, and want it to be taken seriously.
Here are a few things with which you need to be acquainted:
Film : Films are not all the same. There are daylight films which are colour
balanced to daylight and electronic flash light, and tungsten films which require
illumination from incandescent or tungsten light sources. Tungsten films are
usually differentiated in their packaging from daylight films by a 'T' after
the film speed, i.e. 64T. They are not as available as daylight films and tungsten
film is not at all available in the 35mm negative format. You can usually find
them in specialty photography stores. The colour temperature is a measurement
of the colour in degrees Kelvin. Daylight is around 5500 K, and the standardized
tungsten measurement is 3200 K. You can find specialized bulbs with this colour
output in Photography supply stores. The Sylvania ECA is a 500 watt bulb with
3200K colour. The company makes parts for nuclear weapons as well. If you are
nowhere near such a store, you can use a 500 w construction light, that is diffused
(either by putting a diffusing material over the light or reflecting it from
a white panel) as illumination. The colour temperature should be close enough.
One of the most important things you can do in this kind of photography is control
the colour of the light reaching your art work. If you are using daylight film,
do not have other light sources, such as incandescent lights or fluorescent
lights, 'contaminating' the light. Likewise if you are using tungsten film,
do not let fluorescent light or daylight reach the work. When we see these light
sources mixing with our own eyes, the brain gets in the way and we don't see
the difference the light source makes to the colour of the object, because our
memory of the colour of the thing overwhelms what our eyes are telling us. Unfortunately,
film does not see things this way. Daylight reaching tungsten film appears very
blue, whereas tungsten light reaching a daylight film appears very yellow.
Keep all the light reaching your subject consistent and appropriate to the film
you are using.
Equipment - you can make a surprisingly good photograph with very basic equipment.
Basic equipment list
- 35mm camera with manual adjustment and built in light meter ( most SLR cameras
have these features, even if they are heavily automated. Point and shoot cameras
may not give the user manual control.)
- film (use the right film – tungsten or daylight
- gray card
- tripod
- tungsten lights (3200û K bulb – colour temperature)
- bulb holders and reflectors
-umbrellas or reflective card
- light stands
- extension cords
- normal lens for camera (50-60mm) –you may want a wide angle (20-35mm)for
installation views
- cable release
- free space to photograph the work. Choose a space where you can control the
light in the room (i.e. no daylight) and can have enough space around the work
to illuminate it properly and position the camera. example: To photograph a
1 x 1.5 meter work (30 x 40 ins) you will neat at least 4 meters across and
4 meters back from the wall, more for sculpture. 35mm camera with manual settings
and a built in light meter. If your camera is really basic and doesn't have
a light meter , then you might think of finding a small hand held light meter
for measuring the light reaching your subject. If you have a camera that is
completely automatic, you will have to fool it into taking good pictures.
A gray card - this is a card with a standardized gray surface that represents
'middle' gray. This is the exposure every light meter is calibrated for.When
a camera or light meter is making a reading, it is going to give you an aperture/shutter
speed indication that will give you this middle gray. Of course this is fine
if your subject is middle gray. If, however it is substantially lighter or darker
than this middle tone, your light meter will give you an erroneous reading (using
'reflected' reading). To avoid this erroneous reading we in effect replace the
subject with the gray card for the purpose of obtaining a correct exposure reading
for reflected light. This is why it is better to use incident readings. An incident
reading measures the amount of light reaching the subject, rather than the amount
of light being reflected from it. With incident readings, the lightness or darkness
of the subject has little effect on the meter, and is therefore more accurate.
Tripod - You will need something to steady the camera. Buy borrow or steal one
of these, otherwise you will have a lot of work ahead of you trying to find
some way of keeping the camera steady while you take the picture. Any exposure
less than 1/30th or 1/60th of a second needs a tripod, and when you are using
'hot' or tungsten lights, you will find that the times will often exceed the
1/30th threshold by quite a bit, making it impossible to use a hand held camera.
Lights - I use tungsten lights because I can see what I'm getting. Working with
flash or strobe equipment is possible and I will write about this later. I suggest
buying 2 - 500 watt 'ECA' bulbs. They put out a good colour of light and are
relatively long lived for their price. You will also need some holders for these.
There's this lighting store on Canal street in NYC that sells clamp lights with
ceramic holders and reflectors for about $10.00 US. Total bargain. The ceramic
holders are good because these bulbs get pretty hot and tend to melt other kinds
of holders. You will need something to hold the lights or clamp them to. Light
stands are the first choice, but the back of a chair will do. You will also
need some extension cords to get the electricity where you need it.
White wall - you will need one of these with some clear space around it to put
the lights and your camera. This always takes the longest. Do it right and you
won't be swearing the whole time you are trying to photograph. If your work
is very light in value, you may want to consider a dark background. Everyone
understands a white background. Remember, you are photographing the work, not
showing off your great photography skills. That means don't try for dramatic
lighting. Next comes Lighting . Lighting the work is something that many people
have difficulty with. With flat works on the wall, this is fairly straight forward.
You want to avoid getting reflections, so you have to position the lights so
that the light is not reflected directly from the light source back to the camera.
I usually point my lights at the ceiling if the ceiling is reflective (i.e.
white). This gives a soft, even, low contrast illumination, with shadows hanging
off the bottom of the work. This looks reasonably natural and is easy on the
eyes. The low contrast provided by the diffuse light allows us to see into the
shadow areas without burning out the highlights. If the ceiling isn't white,
or is too high, you can get a diffuse light by reflecting the light off two
white panels placed on each side of the work. This means that you have the work
in the middle, then the two lights facing away from the art and reflecting back
from the two white panels. If this setup isn't possible, you can always opt
for direct illumination, pointing the lights directly at the work. The consequence
of this is relatively harsh shadows, but this is not the end of the world. The
important thing is to avoid glare, which is a result of the light being directly
reflected from the light source back to the camera. In order to do this, you
need to place the lights at an angle of at least 45 degrees from the work. That
means away from the camera. The closer the light sources are to the camera,
the more likely the chances for glare.
Even illumination is important. With the diffuse methods of lighting referred
to earlier, the illumination should be relatively even from top to bottom or
side to side. You may have to move the lights back and forth a bit to get this
right. With the direct lighting scenario, this is a little more difficult, and
you may have to move the lights farther away from the art work to have the work
illuminated evenly from corner to corner. Making an exposure reading. If you
have a hand held meter you can make an Incident reading, this is a measurement
of the amount of light reaching the subject. To make this kind of light reading,
you put the little diffuser bulb over the light sensor on the meter and go up
to the art work. Of course your lighting is the way you want it now. Hold the
light meter with the little diffuser pointing back towards the camera, being
careful not to get in the way of any of your lights that you have lighting your
art work. You will find that you have a range of shutter speeds to choose from.
If there are no moving parts to your art work and you are using a tripod, you
can use a fairly small aperture and long exposure time. Tungsten film is specially
made so the reciprocity effect is minimized with long exposures. I won't get
into it here, but reciprocity is something that really messes with the amount
of time you expose your film. So go ahead and use a long exposure say 1 second
at f11 or something. No light meter? take out your trusty gray card. Hold it
in front of your artwork. Take your camera close enough so that the gray card
mostly fills the frame. It doesn't have to be in focus, and adjust your shutter
speed and aperture until they give you a correct reading. Again, the function
of the gray card is to reproduce the standard exposure that the light meter
in your camera is designed to give you. If your work is lighter or darker in
value than this middle gray, the light meter in your camera will adjust the
exposure until it gets its middle gray, regardless of whether or not this is
the right thing for your art. No gray Card? Use the palm of your hand. This
will work regardless of the colour of the rest of your skin, just make sure
that your hand is receiving the same amount of light that the art is. Framing
your art work in the viewfinder This seems obvious, but a lot of people have
difficulty framing in the viewfinder. If you are photographing a rectangular
work on the wall, make sure you position the camera lens right in the center
of the work. Stand back from the camera to see how well you're lined up. If
you're not in the center, the work will take on a trapezoid shape, which isn't
what we're after here. Also, just because you can see the work in the viewfinder
doesn't mean that you're set to go. We have this amazing ability to ignore distracting
details in the background, but once they are a part of the photo, they are much
harder to ignore. Try to come in as close as you can to your artwork, keeping
the camera in the center of it.
Making the exposure Take your light meter reading and set your camera. If the
meter gives you a reading of one second at F8, transpose this to your camera.
If you are using the gray card method as outlined above, do that. At the beginning
of your art documentation experience, it will always be a good thing to 'insure'
yourself against poor exposures. Shoot at least one exposure one stop overexposed
and the other one stop underexposed. Once you get good at this you will be able
to photograph without bracketing, but I strongly recommend that you do at the
beginning. I still do it if I'm ever unsure whether the shot will turn out.
Bracketing is making exposures that are under and over exposed from the light
meter indications. They are a kind of insurance, the idea being that if you
end up only able to use your bracketed shots, you will be able to get copies
made. Now that you have your film in hand. Take it to a good lab. There should
be a pro lab around somewhere that will do the work for you. It's typical to
pay around $8.50 - $11.00 to get a roll of E-6 slide film developed.
Good luck
Paul Litherland
http://lux.ca