Photographing artwork well can often be harder than it looks. To produce a photograph that faithfully represents a quality artwork, a number of factors ned to be considered, including achieving an even exposure, avoiding reflections, focusing accurately, choosing the right aperture, and post production. In this article, I will give some pointers for how to achieve great looking artwork images, whether you wish to do-it-yourself using your camera phone or hire a professional.
Art dealers and galleries sometimes underestimate the importance of investing time in making beautiful, faithful photographic reproductions of the artworks they are selling. As social distancing makes it harder for collectors to visit galleries, they rely on accurate on-line representations to make important decisions on whether they wish to purchase the piece or not.
Galleries and dealers may be required to submit work digitally for exhibitions, grants, talks and sales materials. So good photography is essential in presenting your inventory in the most professional and engaging way.
Photographs also provide an accurate record of inventory for researchers, the gallery archives and for insurance, and therefore represent a good all-round investment.
There are many different ways of photographing art for reproduction either on the web or for print, so the following notes are intended to serve as a guideline.
1. Purpose
Be clear about the purpose for which the photograph is going to be used. Is it solely for the web or are you planning to use it for print as well. How large will the image be reproduced? Is it going to be magnified or have a zoom function added to it on a website?
2. Hire a Professional if you can
Although perfectly adequate results can be achieved from photographing the artwork yourself using a good quality DSLR or even a camera phone, hiring a professional photographer will nearly always pay dividends. The experience that he or she can bring to the finished photograph is invaluable, ensuring that the image is a true representation of the artwork in terms of colour reproduction, detail, lack of reflections and vibrance. This involves both using technical skill in the shoot and also in post production and preparing the image for its intended use.
Take care that you hire a photographer with experience in this field who has access to the right equipment. A professional camera has got a much larger sensor in comparison to a smartphone, and will therefore produce a better quality image.
A good professional photographer will be able to advise what’s best for her shooting and post-production preferences, as well as the intended use of the image. It is well worth the investment, and it needn’t cost as much as you think. There are plenty of great photographers out there.
3. Lighting
Shoot uniformly lit images in daylight or using a good studio lighting setup.
Avoid “warmer” incandescent lighting which will affect the colour rendition of your photograph.
Instead use natural light. Colour is created on a surface by specific wavelengths being absorbed and others being reflected. If the light that is shining on the surface doesn’t contain all of the visible colours (full spectrum), they can’t be reflected, so your camera won’t be able to record them.
Daylight is called full spectrum lighting because it contains all the different coloured wavelengths; some artificial lights have missing colours and ‘spikes’ in the spectrum. Photographing your artwork under low colour rendering household bulbs indoors will prevent the camera from capturing all the different colours in your picture.
You’ll never beat daylight for its ability faithfully to display all the colours of the visible spectrum. It’s an ideal light source for art. The only problem is you can’t control it very well. If you use window light to photograph a piece of art, the exposure will likely be uneven from side to side so use a reflector to even out the light. Also, make sure that it is diffused. Shoot on a cloudy day or out of direct sunlight, with the light reflected off white or light surfaces.
It is usually easier to control the light using studio lighting equipment such as a copy stand, lightbox, tent or light cube to provide even lighting. Use at least two light sources for larger artworks to ensure even lighting. Controlling the light and colour temperature will help to produce an image that is a great representation of the artwork.
If photographing a two dimensional artwork (such as a painting or drawing), ensure that the camera is set so that the lens is aligned with the middle of the painting. You want to position your camera so that the frame is filled with most of the painting, with a bit of background that you can crop out later. A viewfinder grid can help to ensure that you are shooting the artwork head-on rather than at a slight angle, which would cause distorted perspective.
Use a white or neutral background. It makes it easier to remove in post-production and will be less distracting if left in the shot.
If photographing a three dimensional object such as a sculpture or ceramic work, consider shooting against an infinity curve (also known as an infinity cove or cyclorama / cyc). Cyc walls are used to create a background with no perceptible beginning or end. They are popular with product photographers because they allow the photographer to define the subject by removing the appearance of a background of any kind. Photographing against an evenly lit cyc can also be useful in post-production work in Photoshop to edit or remove the background altogether.
Since an infinity curve doesn’t have any corners, shadows don’t gather in the background. The end result is a finished image where the subject appears to have been placed on plain white paper or a blank canvas.
In fact, you can build a simple cyc using clean white paper, curved behind the object.
Avoid using very wide-angled lenses as they tend to distort the image (an extreme example being the effect given by a fish-eye lens which is similar to looking through a door spyhole viewer). A good choice of lens for photographing art is a 50mm or 100mm prime lens (depending on the format of the camera) with decent close-focusing capability. Many people use macro lenses, not least because they create very little distortion at close range. A high-quality zoom will suffice at around portrait-length.
4. Resolution
Shoot at the highest resolution that you can. Even though you don’t need very high resolution for the web (see below), this will cover you for possible print use down the line, should you need it.
5. White Balance.
As explained above, all light is made up of a spectrum of different colours. When photographing artwork, white balance is subjective. Achieving correct white balance is the process of removing unrealistic colour casts, so that objects which appear white to the eye are rendered white in your photograph. Proper camera white balance has to take into account the “colour temperature” of a light source, which refers to the relative warmth or coolness of white light.
There’s a creative decision to make. Do you want to preserve the colour of the artwork as you see it or should you neutralise it and make the whites white?
You can set your camera for the correct white balance using a grey card or choose an area within the artwork that should be neutral in tone – preferably a mid-grey if one exists.
A final note on white balance: the light source makes a critical difference to white balance. So avoid mixed lighting if you can.
6. Shoot multiple views
You may wish to shoot various different views (for instance in the frame and out of the frame), as well as closeups of important elements such as the signature, the back of the artwork etc. Hiring a professional photographer can be expensive, so make the most of her time with you. If time is limited and your budget is tight, you can also just shoot one high resolution photograph and then use different crops to focus on specific details.
7. Include framed and unframed versions
It is useful to make an additional photograph of an artwork in the frame as it allows for use in a ‘View On A Wall’ function, if the website for which you are providing the image has this function. Some art fairs have adopted this way of displaying artworks on a wall with another object (usually a chair) for scale. For artworks in a frame, take care with reflections from the glass.
8. Don’t forget to back up your media!
Ensure that your images are securely backed up. It sounds obvious, but reliable as modern computers are, they do crash and files disappear. I would normally advise that backup copies are kept both in the cloud (iCloud, Amazon S3, Google Drive, iCloud, DropBox etc), with a second safety copy on an external hard drive in case you lose access to your cloud storage.
9. Make sure your photographs are colour balanced
For post production, it is very helpful to have files that are colour balanced to match the original artwork. As a webmaster or publisher, website visitor or collector, we often haven’t seen the original artwork, and the subtle colour hues and contrast that make an artwork unique and beautiful. So we rely on the file that is uploaded to the website being as true to the original as possible. Sometimes colour and grey scale bars are useful, but you shouldn’t rely on colour matching being done by webmasters as it is quite time-consuming and specialist work. Also, one can’t guarantee that the colour that appears on a computer monitor will be accurate or consistent (particularly as very few people except designers and photographers have colour-balanced monitors). If you are providing multiple images of a single artwork, it is worth the photographer taking the time to ensure that they are all of consistent colour and exposure.
10. Colour Space Profiles
For post production processing, there are arguments for both sRGB and Adobe RGB colour space profiles. However, sRGB has become the standard for the web and has been adopted by many companies creating software for the web. sRGB tends to give more consistent results and the same, or brighter, colours than Adobe and other RGB colour space profiles. sRGB is the world’s default colour space for the web, so it’s probably best to process your images in that space.
Having said that, if you think that the photograph is likely to end up in print, Adobe RGB might be a good option as it is based on the CMYK colour model with which printers tend to work. So in an ideal world, your large files for print would be output as Adobe RGB and your smaller files for the web would be sRGB. But this is perhaps a little overkill. If you want to make the choice, I would go with sRGB.
11. File types
In terms of what file types and sizes are best for upload to a website, check what file types are supported. WordPress (the platform on which nearly 40% of websites on the worldwide web is built) does not support TIFF files. So .jpg/.jpeg files are better.
12. File size
Deliver files of an appropriate size to the website publisher or print handling house. You don’t need huge file sizes for the web. 2,000 megabytes (MB) at 72 pixels per inch (ppi) files are adequate for most websites, whilst larger files at 300ppi are required for print. Much depends on how large the image will be displayed on the web or in print. If in doubt, check with the publisher.
13. Cropping
It is best to produce image files that are close cropped to the edge of the artwork in order to ensure that they display consistently on the website.
14. File names
A word on file names. Even though many websites use special programmes to filter them out, website platforms often don’t work well with many symbols, accents or letters from non-Roman alphabets. So it’s best to avoid !@£$%^&*()<>’”:;{}[]® etc and accents (áàâäæåãā) etc. For filing workflow efficiency, it is best to be consistent with fie names, for instance by using the artwork name and a gallery inventory number which will make it easy to search for. Words and numbers can be separated by underscores. So Cattle_Beneath_a_Tree_00012345 would be a good filename by which you can easily identify the image in the file.
15. Watermarks
Avoid adding watermarks to your images. They tend only to act as a distraction.
16. Finally, be consistent.
Once you know what works, rinse and repeat.
