8 tips for photographing art

Wednesday 12 December 2018, 21:18 by Michelle Peeters | 38,173 views | 10 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Photographing art is an art in itself. It is much more complex than quickly taking a snapshot of a painting or sculpture. This quickly produces flat and meaningless images that do not show the artwork at its best.

When photographing works of art, you need to pay attention to many things, such as the right lighting, possible reflections, the right angle, etcetera. That is why artist Jacqueline van den Bos gives you some tips for photographing art in this article.

Jacqueline van den Bos in her studio in Amsterdam
Jacqueline exhibits her paintings at Galerie ADK on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam and photographs her own work. If you want to present yourself well as an artist, having good, technically correct photographs is an absolute must.

Photographing her own paintings and drawings is a difficult task that takes a lot of time. She uses a Nikon D80 DSLR with an 18-55 lens for this. She zooms in slightly to avoid distortion as much as possible. Straightening converging lines afterwards is really not an option with works of art.

The aperture is not particularly relevant when photographing flat surfaces, such as two-dimensional paintings or drawings. She regularly photographs at an aperture of f/5. It really does not need to be f/22.

With three-dimensional artworks, depth of field is of course a different matter. You can best photograph sculptures at eye level, while taking some distance and zooming in slightly.

The artworks should not be presented in a frame, that is an unwritten rule, and they should not be behind glass either, as that would create too many reflections. A light grey background, so not white or black, often works best.

1. Turn off the flash

It is best not to use the flash, because this quickly causes overexposure and reflections, especially with non-matt paint. The texture of the paint also becomes rather flat when using a flash.

Instead, you can use a reflector, for example an improvised one made from white polystyrene foam. Jacqueline also has a white sheet on the floor to reflect the light from above.

If, for example, there is a window on the left-hand side of a painting, reflect the light on the right-hand side with your reflector. The light is then reflected, at a reduced strength, so it still comes from both sides.

You may have noticed that the rooms in museums containing lots of shiny paintings are always fairly dimly lit. To prevent reflections from shiny paint, a matt varnish is sometimes applied as well.

See how the shadow falls, in this case the light comes from above, and place a reflector on the shadow side
Do you really need to use flash? Try doing it indirectly, for example via the white ceiling or a side wall. If you do have to flash straight on, take enough distance from the artwork and use fill flash only. This is less harsh than using TTL or full power.

With three-dimensional works of art, flash can actually work well, because it can brighten shadows in corners and gaps that would otherwise disappear completely.

The light from above and from the side is reflected

2. Use a tripod

When photographing art, it is useful to use a tripod. This can also prevent you from having to use flash. You can then take photographs more easily in low light without a flash by setting a longer shutter speed.

Thanks to the tripod, you do not have to worry about camera shake. To prevent camera shake completely, you can also use your camera's self-timer.

No tripod to hand? Place your camera on a flat surface, such as a low wall or cupboard, or lean against a door frame.

Use a tripod so you photograph at exactly the right height and parallel to the painting

3. Pay attention to colour temperature and white balance

If you photograph indoors, which is often the case with paintings, using light sources other than daylight, it is important to pay attention to the colour tones or colour temperature of these light sources, the lamps.

LED light has a colour temperature of 6500 Kelvin. This provides a good colour temperature, the same as daylight. Jacqueline is lucky to have a skylight in her studio, which lets in lots of diffuse daylight.

Daylight always looks slightly bluish. It is definitely not warm, yellowish light! Photographing in low light produces incorrect colours. Everything becomes too blue and too dark. This can no longer be recovered on the computer.

Our eyes easily adapt to different colour temperatures and can readily determine what is white. A camera has more trouble with this. That is why it is important to set the camera's white balance correctly for the situation. The aim is to match the white in your image to the white your eyes see.

If you photograph in RAW, you can still adjust the white balance afterwards. Different colour temperatures in one room are more difficult to fix in post-processing, however. You can even them out by using gels or filters.

You can still adjust the colour temperature in post-processing based on the white of the wall that you photographed as well. Preferably work with neutral light, in lightly overcast weather.

Sometimes photographing with artificial light is unavoidable, and then you are bound to get yellow photographs. Correcting this on your computer is very difficult. Try to turn off artificial light sources as much as possible, especially fluorescent light, which gives a green cast.

4. Make sure the colours are right!

If you have photographs of the artworks printed, you need to make sure the colours are right. Or at least that they come as close as possible to reality.

Painting with Ultramarine colour
The painting above contains, for example, two different shades of blue. The colour Ultramarine, a purplish blue, cannot be printed, only approximated. What a good printer does is choose one of the print colours, CMYK, in this case Cyan, and add some red to it. In the photograph, you therefore only see Cyan blue.

The colour gamut of a print is simply much smaller than that of oil paint. It can never match the original. Pink and kraplak always become red. Dark yellow and lemon yellow always become one standard yellow.

In any case, make sure you set the colour space to Adobe RGB or Profoto RGB. You can do this on the camera, although it makes no difference if you photograph in RAW, and in Photoshop/Lightroom when exporting to JPG. This gives you a much wider colour range than sRGB. Read Elja's article about using colour spaces here.

5. Preferably use soft daylight

You do not need a high resolution for the internet, so you can easily photograph with a simple compact camera. But the more detail you can capture, the better, of course. Photographing with a full-frame system or DSLR camera therefore offers many advantages.

Daylight is ideal for photographing paintings. Before she had this studio, Jacqueline always dragged her paintings outside to photograph them.

Natural light does not become yellow, but tends towards blue. This keeps the red in a painting beautifully red instead of turning it orange. It gives a realistic colour reproduction, which is essential for your overall colour balance.

Try to create a setup with as much natural light as possible coming from the front, while making sure you cannot see the shadow of yourself with the camera.

Jacqueline's studio is ideal in this respect. The light comes in diffusely from above at an angle through frosted glass. This is why the drawing table is positioned at an angle for photographing black-and-white drawings at the end of this article.

A setup with grazing light can also work very well. This means natural light from the side. You then get good depth and the 3D aspect of your paintings comes out beautifully. A nearby window letting daylight in often works very well too.

With side light, you can add light nicely with a sheet of polystyrene foam or an empty canvas. White walls also reflect the light back beautifully and diffusely. Black or dark walls would absorb the light instead.

The daylight enters from above through a frosted glass window and is reflected again via a white sheet on the floor
There is a difference between photographing a dark work and a light work. You sometimes need to overexpose or underexpose. If you photograph in RAW, you can recover blocked-up shadows or reduce clipped highlights to bring back some detail when contrasts are too high.

The best light source is soft daylight. Sculptures or other works of art are often outside. It is best to photograph them in the shade rather than in bright sunlight. An overcast day is perfect because of the soft light. Direct, harsh light creates unpleasant shadows and reflections and can affect the colour of the artwork in the photograph.

Also always check that no strange patches of light fall on the artwork through reflections from glass, mirrors or furniture.

6. Position of the artwork and camera

When photographing a painting, it is important that the edges of the painting run parallel to the edges of your photo frame. When a painting is hanging on the wall, this is often not a problem.

Hang the painting level and measure the height of the exact centre of the painting
A rectangular canvas should be photographed straight on. You can do this by measuring the height of the centre of the canvas while it is hanging. Then place the camera on a tripod at exactly the same height. Small deviations here create skewed distortions.

It looks best to show artworks without a frame or wall. So you need to crop them. That is why you should photograph the image as straight as possible. You can, incidentally, use the Free Transform tool in Photoshop to fill a skewed corner to 90 degrees. But with artworks this is of course tricky.

Place your tripod at the same height as the exact centre of the painting
If, for example, an artwork is leaning at an angle against the wall, you will also need to tilt the camera slightly so that the edges run parallel again. As long as you do not have to point your camera upwards at an angle, so make sure you photograph at the same height as the painting, it works fine.

An eraser clamped between the wall and the bottom of the painting prevents it from leaning forwards
Try to zoom in as much as possible and fill the frame with the artwork as much as possible. Leave only a small border between the artwork and the edge of the frame. This makes optimum use of your camera's resolution.

She also always puts a sheet on the floor, because otherwise you always get a gradient from light at the top to darker at the bottom, in the case of skylight.

7. Check whether the background is suitable

If you photograph a painting, this is less important, as you make sure you capture the painting filling the frame. But if you photograph a work of art other than a painting, you do need to pay attention to a suitable background.

A plain background is often best, light grey often works best and is better than black or white, because the attention is then focused only on the art object. A black or white background is often used. With certain artworks, colour can also work very well.

You can easily make a background yourself by hanging a cloth or paper against the back wall. If you let the cloth or paper continue across the floor, you can avoid corners that only distract from the subject.

If you present your work on a website, a beige or very light grey background with lots of space around the artwork is usually the most effective.

8. Black-and-white drawings

Photographing black-and-white drawings is an art in itself. If you hang them on the wall, this creates too much tonal variation in the white and too much variation in light from top to bottom.

Jacqueline attaches the drawing to the background with masking tape rolled up, as Blu Tack creates bumps in the paper. She attaches the drawing to a drawing table set at an angle, dark in colour.

You also avoid the shadow of your camera hanging above the drawing, which you would get if you placed the drawing flat on the floor. She then positions the tripod properly.

Photographing drawings from above or at the same angle as the light source
She places small markers so that she can quickly photograph a series one after another. The light must once again be even! You often still need to increase the contrast on the computer. Sometimes she converts the photograph to black and white to make the image calmer.

Improvising

Jacqueline had to improvise and experiment a lot to photograph her work professionally. This turned out to be very educational. There will probably be better and easier ways to achieve good results.

If you have a good and useful tip, let us know in the comments!

Art photography course

Want to know more about photographing art or photographing artistically? Then take a look at the Van Beeld naar Kunst course by Micky Hoogendijk, art photography.

Dit artikel is voor het laatst bijgewerkt op 12 december 2018.
De eerste publicatiedatum is maandag 19 februari 2018, 20:40.

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