Artists Help: How to Photograph Your Own Work
Being able to document your own artwork is essential as an artist. There are two reasons why you want to create pictures of your own art: One, is to generate interest in seeing the actual work if you people can not see it in person, nine times out of ten you will not have the opportunity to show your original work; the other is with websites like KounterKulture it is possible to see every detail of the work so that collectors do not have to see the work in person. This last aspect will save everyone time and money which can only help you with sales.
If hiring a professional photographer is out of the question for you, then this set of guidelines should assist you in achieving the best possible results.
Digital Cameras
Working with a digital camera is preferred; especially if you eventually plan on emailing the photographs of your artwork.
Set Up
- Set your artwork up on a plain white wall.
- Set your camera up on a tripod.
- Be sure to fill the frame, no extraneous information.Try to always shoot your work prior to framing in order to avoid problems with glare and hot spots.Double check to be certain there are no shadows appearing through the viewfinder.Also check for reflections, focus, etc.
- Now you are ready to set up your lights so that the work appears fully illuminated. Use your light meter (either hand-held or in the camera) to scan the piece for even lighting. Then use a Grey card (available in photo stores) to get an accurate reading.
- Your first few shots should be considered an experiment. Play with the camera settings and see what works.Once you have found what works take lots of shots. You never know what will turn out and what will not, it is better to be safe then sorry.
File Size
You will need a low resolution picture of only a few hundred KB. This is to email and use for documents that need to be small. You will also need a high resolution photo, at least one or two MB, that can be used for finer viewing like on the KounterKulture website
MegaPixels
Megapixels refers to how fine a resolution you can get with your camera. Consumer cameras range as high as 12mp, and professional cameras as high as 36mp+. If you're intending on photographing your artwork simply for a word document, a 2mp camera can be as effective as a 10mp. However, if you plan to have a high resolution, which is almost a must these days, more megapixels are needed.
Post Processing
After you take your digital photographs, it is often customary to edit them on a computer to remove extraneous information (cropping) and do after-the-fact color correction.The first operation on your photo that you should do it to crop.
- Cropping- Is to remove the space around your art in the photograph. The tighter the crop when you originally took the photograph the better.
- Colour Correction- This command executes an algorithm designed to determine the extents of the colours captured in your photo, then tweaks the boundaries to make sure the white and black point are correctly set. For the present job of correcting your photograph, using your photo editing program's auto colour correction is likely your best bet.
- Resizing- If you want low resolution photos a resolution around 800x800@ 150dpi will accurately display your work. If you plan on high resolution it is best to leave the image at its native resolution or increase the dpi. To resize your photograph, find the image size command in your photo editing software. This command is often under the image menu if your program has one. Make sure that "constrain proportions" is enabled (if the option is given), as you only wish to scale your photograph, not distort the ratio of height to width.
- Saving- save your edited file as something different than the original so that your keep the original intact. You may have the option of which filetype you wish to save as, go with a JPEG.