Photographing painting

[Chris Saper]

When I photograph my paintings outdoors, a couple of guidelines have been helpful.

1. Match your Kelvin temperatures! Daylight film is calibrated to be most color accurate at about 10:00 am and 2:00 pm on a typical sunny day, so pick the time that you take the photos. If you are taking photos on a cloudy day, it is unrealistic to expect the colors to be recorded as accurately.

2. Angle the sunlight properly. Your canvas should be upright, and angled at 45 degrees to the direction of the sunlight to minimize glare and surface distortion.

3. Frame your painting accurately. Make sure that the edges of your canvas are squared within the viewfinder of your SLR camera. This is essential to avoid image distortion and bowing.

4. Bracket your exposures. Take a shot at the recommended setting , then one at a lesser f-stop and one at a greater f-stop. On automatic cameras, this is often termed +/- .

5. Include a Kodak color bar reference.

6. Pick your film. After hundreds of rolls of Kodak/Kodak Gold 'grabbing ' the reds, I have tried (on Tom Edgerton's suggestion) the Fuji NPC, which I have found to pick up color subtleties more effectively. See my comparative re-post (to be posted shortly ) under Unveilings.

That being said, you will never get the same quality of color consistently by shooting outdoors, as you will with Tungsten-controlled lighting (see next post).

Chris