Photographing Paintings – Leopard

Learn how to light and photograph artwork with accuracy and confidence. This class walks you through the essential setup, techniques, and considerations for capturing paintings with true-to-life colour, detail, and texture – ideal for artists, archivists, and anyone shooting flat art.

Comments

  2. filippo-72990

    For paintings with textured surfaces, it could be interesting to show the brush strokes as dynamic of the creation process. Maybe the soft light should be more directional (creating shadows on the brush strokes), probably using large softboxes (or reflective panels ) on one or two sides.
    For the making uniform the lighting across the painting, what about using LCC (i.e. feature of Capture One) or D&B ?
    About the gold, the solution of using hard lights in front of the subject is interesting and effective, but in case of specular surfaces I was expecting to see gradient lights. What would happen using gradient ?

    1. Hi, for textured surface paintings I run a large fresnel from above as an extra light and then I shoot with and without it so the artist can choose where they want to show texture ontop of the global illumination lighting (similar to the option for the gold but just for texture). For the gold gradient lighting would put a gradient on the gold going from light to dark but it would be harder to control for each area and would be just as easy to blend the full gold with a soft brush back to the non gold lighting for the same effect.

  3. Farzan Samsamy

    Another fantastic class, as always, Karl! I’ve attended many classes over time, but your teaching style is truly unique. You have a way of making complex concepts clear and engaging, and I really appreciate the effort and passion you bring to every session. Thank you for creating such a positive and inspiring learning environment—it makes a huge difference and motivates me to keep improving. I’m really grateful for the knowledge and guidance you share with us!

  4. peteharper

    This was interesting, I’ve been shooting art works for the last couple of years, having started with the previous painting photography class and then experimented with different set-ups as it suits me and my shooting location, taking bits of lighting information from a whole range of classes and a number of years as a member of Karl Taylor and then Visual Education!

    It’s funny you should mention having multiple grey cards – I have exactly that! I shoot with the paintings flat on their backs with have the camera overhead in a copystand configuration and have 9 pieces of cheap grey card (cut down from an A4 sheet) in the areas that you say! I can take the one shot and place RGB markers (in CaptureOne) on each grey card piece and see where I need to tweak the exposure.

    In order to make sure the camera is directly overhead, I use the ‘mirror technique’, which is something I pictured up from digitising film. It’s somewhat similar to your technique for getting the right shape of the rear reflection card in bottle shots; you put a mirror on your surface (before you place the painting) with the camera pointing straight down at it, put your focus spot in the very centre position and then adjust the geared head so the focus spot is dead in the centre of the lens. This can only really work when the painting will be on the horizontal rather than the vertical however.

    One thing that I do differently from I think every other reproduction photographer, at least in my area (Edinburgh) is to have the artist with me when I shoot. When researching the market, I found that many artists and galleries would comment that the photos they got back from other providers were not always to their liking, in that the colours may be off compared to what they want or they haven’t been aligned properly or not even cropped for immediate use. With this in mind, I decided on having the artist with me and it’s like having the art director on a commercial set; they have the final sign off so they will always go away happy! I’ve also found it really important to have to explain monitor calibration and printer calibration to artists – they’re obviously not as technical as us so have to assure them that the image may look different when they view the files on their own computers but that the file itself and the print will be fine (but still always do a test strip!). One of the first jobs I did, the artist and I coloured her images on my calibrated monitor but she was not happy at all when she saw them on her own laptop. I went round to see what she was looking at; turns out her laptop was over 20 years old and the screen was permanently tinted a very strong blue! She was happy with her prints….eventually….!

    I’ve been using some old Bowens Gemini Pro flash heads but I find some colours do not reproduce properly and can require a lot of editing. CaptureOne is great at auto-selecting colours but it’s something I want to do less of. I was thinking of upgrading to some second hand Siros heads when funds allow; I would like to think they a better distribution of colours across the spectrum, perhaps my old Bowens have spikes and troughs in particular colours. Cheers!

    1. Hi Peter, that’s great to hear that you’re using some of the same techniques. I like the idea of your mirror technique but because I photograph a lot of large paintings I prefer to shoot vertically so I might not be able to make it work with the mirror. I have the artist with me during the post production stage as there is nothing they can offer during the shooting but having them with me and the paintings during the post production stage is very useful in providing the contrast and colour they prefer.

    2. Fascinating! Having the client so closely involved can be double-edged sword but, like you, I find it helps make sure that everyone is on the same page. And they see just how much skill and time is needed to get a good result. How high is your ceiling?

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