Photographing Artworks

The subject of photographing artworks popped up this week in my discussions with other artists.  I thought it would be good to put down my procedures and see if anybody else was doing things in a similar manner, or had other ideas.

When I say "photographing artworks", I mean (for me) paintings, drawings, and charcoal/pastel works.  So, 2D stuff.  Good photos are important for documenting your work, entering shows, and approaching galleries.  Lots of professional artists take their completed artworks to professional photographers to get high-quality images.  Since I'm a cheapskate and more of a do-it-yourselfer, I do my own photography.  They may not be as high-quality as a pro will give you, but they do the job for me.

My equipment is fairly basic: a decent digital SLR camera (mine's a Canon T3i, several years old now but does fine), a photographer's gray card, an easel with a piece of white tape, and my trusty old (circa 2008) Apple iMac.  The software is the old iPhoto that came with the computer, and Photoshop Elements.  I use iPhoto as the storage manager for all my studio photos, and Photoshop Elements to do the minor tweaking needed to make the image files correct.

I shoot my photos outside, in the shade.  The light there is very even, so there are no hot spots on the artwork.  For works that are on paper, I tape them to a panel with artist tape, which is basically white drafting tape that is pH-neutral.  For works on panels or canvas, I put them on an easel that has a piece of that artist tape adjacent to the painting.  So what's with the white artist tape?  Well, it gives me a reference in adjusting the color and lighting.  More on that in a minute.

Now that the artwork is ready, it's time to set up the camera.  The better your setup, the better your camera's photo, and the better your camera's photo the better the ultimate result will be.  As mentioned, I use a digital SLR camera with all sorts of adjustments.  Yes, it has a lot of automatic features, too, but I've found that I can get consistently better results by carefully controlling the setup and exposure manually.

First, I set the white balance to "shade" or, if I'm lazy, to "automatic".  That will get the color balance close to correct.  Then I set the ISO, which is basically the speed at which the camera receives and processes light.  A slow ISO gives smoother grain and more detail.  A high ISO (like 1600) is really grainy, fuzzy, and with colors that only have a vague reference to reality.  Even a moderate ISO (like 400) is noticeably less sharp and color-correct.  Typically, I set my ISO at 100.

Next, I set the exposure, which means adjusting the f-stop and shutter speed.  I hold my photographic gray card in front of the artwork and take a reading through the lens of the camera.  Setting the f-stop and shutter speed is a trade-off as they directly affect each other.  Generally, I go for a shutter speed of 1/60 of a second, which allows me to hold the camera in my hands instead of using a tripod.  Then I set the f-stop to get the proper exposure.

Does all this fiddling with the camera sound like overkill?  Well, it's necessary.  Light from different sources can vary tremendously in color.  Human eyes automatically compensate, so we typically don't notice.  An incandescent bulb gives a yellow light, many old fluorescents give a greenish light, and LED's can provide a variety of colors (go to a Home Depot or Lowes and look at the examples in their lighting section).  Blue skies provide a blue color.  So by setting the white balance to "shade", I'm telling the camera to adjust for a bluish light.  In other words, dial back the blue, dude.

Regarding exposures, digital cameras look at the amount of light they see coming through the lens and then adjust their automatic settings so that the light averages out to a medium gray.  If my artwork is dark or light, that will throw the automatic settings off.  The light artworks will come out too dark and the dark ones too light.  So by using the photo gray card and manually adjusting the exposure, the camera will get an image that is closer to being correct.

Okay, now for the actual photo.  As indicated earlier, I don't like to use a tripod because it takes a long time to get it adjusted right.  I center the artwork in the camera's viewfinder and then adjust my body position up, down, left, and right so that the artwork's top, bottom, and sides are parallel to, and close to, the top, bottom, and sides of the viewfinder edges.  Snap!  Then I may make slight adjustments to my position, or to the exposure, and take a few more snaps.  There's no penalty with digital images.

Here's an example, shot in the parking lot at my studio.  Yes, the lot has a slant, which is why the bricks aren't level, but they're not important - the painting is.  You can see the tape just above the canvas, and you can see that the artwork needs to be rotated clockwise just slightly.

Great, now I have images in my camera.  Now to edit them so that they can be useful.

I plug the camera into my ancient iMac, open up iPhoto, and download the images.  A quick look will show which image seems best, so then I'll open up that image in Photoshop Elements.  The first step is to color-correct.  I point at the white artist tape and hit the "remove color cast" selection.  That tells the computer that the white tape is supposed to be white, so if it sees other colors (like blue from the sky), then dial back that color over the whole image until the tape reads as "white".  Then I adjust the exposure balance.  I adjust the highlights so that the white is white without being blown out, and the black is black without losing any detail.  It's easier than it sounds here.  And I adjust the midrange if necessary.

Now it's time to crop out all the non-art stuff: the bricks on the wall behind the easel, the artist tape, all that stuff around the edges.  To do this, I first rotate the image as needed.  If I did a decent job outside, then it may require 1/4 to 1/2 degree rotation left or right.  Then I use the crop tool to set the boundaries, hit the button, and there we are: one new art image.

Sounds ridiculously complicated, doesn't it?  It's not.  I can do the whole thing in less than five minutes, from walking out the door with the easel to looking at the finished image on the computer screen.  Basically:
- Set up the easel, artwork, and tape.
- Set the ISO, white balance, and manual exposure.
- Grab the photo gray and set the exposure.
- Take the photo.
- Take everything back to the studio.
- Plug the camera in and download the photos.
- Choose the best photo and make the adjustments to color and lighting, then rotate and crop it.
- Done.

One question that comes up more and more is, can you use your phone to take the photos instead of a DSLR?  Sure you can.  My iPhone takes pretty damn good pictures, including some of the artwork photos on my website.  The images won't be quite as sharp because the lens isn't nearly as good, the images will have fewer pixels, and they'll come out of the phone at a lower resolution.  But for websites, Facebook, and Instagram, they'll do just fine.

Okay, this turned out to be ridiculously long, much longer than I thought it would.  A 5-minute task takes a lotta words to describe, doesn't it?  I hope this helps some artists in taking your own photos and saving a few bucks.

The Embody Project

Last week, I had the opportunity to work with Erica Mueller and Trey Scott.  They're partners in the Embody Project, a photo and video exploration of people and body issues.  I won't tell you any more than that, except to say: go look at the project's web site, and spend a lot of time there.  It's good stuff.  Erica is a professional photographer and Trey a professional videographer.  They bring their highly-developed skills to this very heart-felt project.  I was highly impressed just looking at their web site, so the opportunity to work with two pros was too good to pass up.

Erica wanted to do a photo session with an artist's life model.  She needed a working artist's studio and some artists to draw the figure.  My studio was certainly available and so were a couple of other artists.  We gathered there last Thursday.  The model, David, is a really nice guy who turned out to be an outstanding figure model - very experienced, very good poses, and lots of material to work with.  When we set up the studio, our mission was to allow Erica and Trey to get the best shots they could of artists working from the figure.  Our own drawing experience was in the "nice to do" category but it was not the purpose of the session.  One of the things Erica noticed during setup was that the spotlight on the model was very warm, while the supporting lights for the artists were very cool, almost blue.  As you'll see in her resulting photo, this actually turned out for the best, as it provided a conceptual break between David and the artists.

When we actually got moving, it was intense.  We did ten 1-minute poses.  I was working with vine charcoal on paper, Tebbe was using pencil, and Mark was doing oil on panel.  David, the model, kept time in his head, and moved from one pose to the next quickly and seamlessly.  Ever done 1-minute life drawing?  You gotta move fast.  Get it down, get it right, keep moving, because it's gonna be over in a few seconds and you start a new one.  I compared it to being on a ski slope when you're in over your head but committed, and your only option is to ride that slope and stay on your feet.  Here are a couple of my sketches:

After a short break to discuss the next steps, we did a couple of 10-minute poses.  After those short poses, ten minutes seemed like forever ... at least until the time was up, in which case it was way too short.  Again, it was intense.  Draw quick: time's almost up!

Through it all, Erica and Trey kept shooting.  Erica must have taken a thousand photos.  Trey had his camera going constantly, sometimes on the tripod and sometimes walking around.  I'd be working away and out of the corner of my eye would see a figure and camera moving slowly around us, peering over our shoulders or backing out to take in the whole scene.

And then it was done.  We stood around discussing the experience and started packing up.  It took a while.  Anytime you have a shared, intense experience, it takes some time to come down from it.

From the thousand or so photos that Erica took, she has posted one, along with David's own thoughts.  It's really good.  You can see it here: embodyproject.com/david-usa/.

Two Photographers

Two photographers have caught my eye.  They are both women, and the work they do could not be more different.  But both of them make stunning images.

A friend of mine let me know about Elizabeth D. Herman.  Elizabeth makes very powerful images of people.  Some series are portraits, some are life in the streets, some are a mixture.  She captures the soul of her subjects in a way that very, very few photographers can.  Elizabeth isn't concerned about making her subject look good, but rather, she brings out something much deeper than just a surface appearance.  

Photograph copyright Elizabeth D. Herman

I find that I respond to these images because she's doing with photography what I try to do with my drawings and paintings.  Her series "A Woman's War" focused on the impact of war on women who have fought in various ways around the world.  This is a similar theme to my "Meditation on War" series and my Iraq and Afghanistan works.  So, to me, it's wonderful to find somebody else who's concerned with the same ideas, but pursuing them in their own way. 

I've swapped a few emails with this young lady and she's doing some great things.  She won a Fulbright Fellowship to work in Bangladesh. This year, she won the Tim Hetherington Award for photojournalism (this is a Very Big Deal in the photojournalism world).  She recently returned from Bosnia, a place where I worked as part of the peacekeeping forces in 1996.  And she's only been out of college for not even three years.  So this is somebody who's going places.  Go look at her website.

The other photographer is Christy Lee Rogers.  Her work is very different: it's sensual.  It's more about color and the shapes of figures, almost as if the painter Rubens was an abstract expressionist photographer.  The figures are anonymous, bathed in light against deep black, swathed in saturated blues and reds and whites, and floating weightlessly in watery space.  Paintings and photographs that are about beauty, color, shape, and light usually bore me to tears.  These fascinate me.  Go look and see for yourself.

Photograph copyright Christy Lee Rogers

Photography by Rob Amberg

My friend Rob Amberg is a photographer. That's like saying Bob Dylan writes songs. Rob focuses his most personal work on Madison County, in the mountains of North Carolina, along the Tennessee border. Now Madison County is about as rural as you can get. It's Appalachia with a capital A, pretty poor, with lots of outhouses still in use. But it's easy to miss the depth, vibrancy, and richness of the people who live there. Rob doesn't. He knows the people and their ways. Most importantly, he treats them with respect.

Rob has had 36 of his photos published in Big Bridge, which is an online poetry and arts magazine. Take a look. Take your time. You won't see a bunch of thumbnails from which to pick the two or three you want to look at - rather, you have to page through them, one at a time, by clicking on each photo. It's slow, like the pace of life in the mountains, and it's worth it.

I have a personal interest in Rob's work, besides admiring it immensely. Some of these photos were taken very close to my house. And I know one or two of the people who appear in this collection. Rob's photos do great justice to my home county.