Photos of paintings

CB

I'm remaking my showcase site, and one of the things I want to add is a section of my paintings. I figured it would be easy, but the photos don't seem to be turning out quite right.... None of the photos really end up accurately portraying the painting.

I attached an example (This isn't one of my better paintings, but it's best example of the problem I'm having). I took this photo with my nice Cannon PowerShot A610. See all those odd brush strokes up in the black sky? It doesn't look like that in person, not from any angle, nor any lighting, I've tried to bring them out, but they only show up in the photos of the painting. In the photo it looks like I used two different gloss-values of black for some reason.

Also, you can see the texture of the canvas really clearly, which I don't like, and which is also not true when you look at the paintings in person.

Anyone have any tips for photographing paintings? (I work in acrylics, BTW, if that matters.)

GHoosdum

I don't know about the black, but apply a slight blur filter to remove the canvas texture appearance...

primesuspect

first of all, to take an accurate photo of a painting requires soft fill flash as you would get from a lightbox. There is no way to take an accurate photo of a painting with an on-board flash from a point-n-shoot camera. The only way around it with your camera would be to take off the flash and use soft lamps with white sheets in front of them, from three different angles to eliminate all shadows - the shadows are why you are seeing those phantom textures.

Zanthian

http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/07/how-to-diy-10-macro-photo-studio.html
Here is a small tutorial on a light box.

CB

GHoosdum wrote:

I don't know about the black, but apply a slight blur filter to remove the canvas texture appearance...

I'd rather not have to blur the photos to get them right, if possible.

primesuspect wrote:

first of all, to take an accurate photo of a painting requires soft fill flash as you would get from a lightbox. There is no way to take an accurate photo of a painting with an on-board flash from a point-n-shoot camera. The only way around it with your camera would be to take off the flash and use soft lamps with white sheets in front of them, from three different angles to eliminate all shadows - the shadows are why you are seeing those phantom textures.

Hm... What if I took the paintings outside on a bright yet cloudy day? would that be a diffuse enough light environment, do you think?

Zanthian wrote:

http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/07/how-to-diy-10-macro-photo-studio.html
Here is a small tutorial on a light box.

This is very similar to what I was already planing to do for photos of my painted miniatures, but I don't think it would help much for my paintings, being large and two-dimensional...

Thrax

I don't think those are odd shadows.

They appear to be the actual brush strokes you used. The reason you can't see them is because the human eye isn't as sensitive as the CCD of the camera. The camera is picking up the subtle differences in the chroma of black, or the density of the color on the canvas. :\

primesuspect

Outside won't make a difference because you still only have one lamp (the sun!), and shadows are impossible to avoid.

Nomad

You need to use a light box.

CB

I don't have a cardboard box big enough to make a lightbox that could hold most of my paintings. Is there an easier way to make a large lightbox?

Nomad

Just go dig out an oven or refrigerator box out back of an appliance store.

GHoosdum

There's foam core board, and I read a writeup once of a guy that used white bed sheets in part of his garage with two large diffused lights to the sides and behind the camera for photographing large items.