[On Painting] On Cameras for Photographing Paintings

[Duane]

I get a lot of questions about the cameras I use to photograph paintings so I thought I'd pass along some info. I will defer the finer points of shooting artwork to the book I learned from:"Photographing Your Artwork"

This is the best book I know for teaching the basics about shooting paintings. I'm not sure if it has been updated to include digital cameras but it doesn't matter because the basic prinicples concerning your lighting set-up and polarizing filters are the same. The polarizing filter attaches to your lens and works in combination with polarizing filters in front of your lights (in the form of gels.) With this set-up you can have almost complete control over the amount of glare that reaches your camera.

Here are a couple of couple cameras that have worked well for me. One is high res for archiving (using the above lighting set-up) and the other is a simple snapshot camera I use for the images I post to my blog. I archive my images with as high a resolution as I can afford so that I always have the option to print them (for my upcoming book for example.)

High Res: Sony DSC-R1
Snapshot: Nikon Coolpix 3200

I'm not sure I'd recommend the Sony (even though it takes good pics) because it's comically complex-- everytime I pick it up I have to check the manual. I think I'd go with the Nikon D-200 if I had it to do over. The Nikon D-70 (now D-70s) is what I used before the Sony and I found it to be a great camera. It shoots 6mp, which is fine for a decent print, and since it is getting a little longer in the tooth you can probably get a good deal on it. Also, the Nikon D-50 looks like another solid, basic SLR.

The Coolpix 3200 only takes 3 megapixel images but that's plenty for the net, and you can probably buy it for cheap these days. It gives you good control over the exposure etc and it has good battery life. It recently died on me after thousands of pics.I learned to take decent internet-worthy shots of my Postcard Paintings by shooting slightly off-angle under incandescent lamps. Tip: if you find the camera lens is distorting your image (the fisheye effect) move the camera further away from the painting and zoom in on it. This minimizes the fisheye effect.

If you're in the market for a camera a good place to get reviews etc is called Steves Digicams.

Once the picture is shot, of course, you have to "develop" it in an image editing program, which is a topic for another post.

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Posted By Duane to On Painting at 11/19/2006 10:28:00 AM