I’ve shot a lot of art work. Here are some things to keep in mind for such shooting. If you’ve done this before, most of this may be second nature, but I learned a lot of it the hard way.
Since you are in a studio, shooting stationary objects, you do not need to worry about short exposure times. Hence, you can stop down whatever lens you use to its optimal sharpness, probably somewhere around f8 or f11. So, you don’t need any particularly fast lenses. Distortion and flatness of the focus field is most important. In this regard, I do not like my DA f1.8 50mm - at least for my copy, when the center is in focus, the corners are not, at least up to f5.6 or so. Macro lenses probably offer the best performance here.
Again, since exposure length does not matter, use the lowest ISO your camera has for least image noise. Make sure you have a good solid tripod, and use a cable release or the 2-second mirror lockup mode.
Make sure you have the white balance and exposure set properly! This saves a lot of time in post-processing. In fact, if you’ve got it right, you may not need any PP at all.
Set a custom white balance, and check it every shooting session. Depending on your lights (i.e. fluorescents), they may need some warm up time during which both the amount of light and color temperature may vary.
Get a color checker card, and include it in every picture. If you got the WB wrong, this will help you fix it.
Depending on your customer, you probably want to put some kind of scale indicator in each shot as well. I combined my ruler and color checker card.
Put the brightest highlights close to the right edge on your histogram. Check the color histograms - just looking at the overall histogram can fool you. This gives you maximum dynamic range.
Depending on what kind of art you are shooting, you may be bothered by reflection glints from oil bumps and ridges. You may want to experiment with polarizers on your lights and lens. If your objects have cover glass, you may be bothered by reflections of your camera set up! Keep the illumination off the camera/tripod as much as possible - use baffles on the lights as necessary to keep your camera in the shadows. In the worst case (and I’ve had to do this), you may need a big (half the size of your largest such object) black cloth in front of your camera with a hole in the middle just big enough to let the lens peek through.
For your larger objects, uniformity of lighting can be a problem. You want lights on both sides of your objects, with probably some vertical spread as well for larger objects.
The biggest PITA is getting your camera exactly square and centered with respect to your objects. You want the art work as flat as possible in the plane orthogonal to the line of sight from the camera, and you want the camera dead center wrt to the center of the painting. Otherwise, you will get misshapen images (your art works are probably mostly rectangular in shape (?)). Use a tape measure or ruler to determine the height of the picture center, and set your camera lens to the same height (assuming your picture is flat against a wall!).
If you are shooting more than a few objects, it’s worth spending a modest amount of time figuring out how you are going to hang them. I came up with a vertical mounting system attached to a wall in my “studio” (a room adjacent to the art works) that allowed me to hang the paintings at an appropriate height for their size, so I didn’t have to move my camera up and down more than an inch or two. I would recommend against using an easel, unless it holds your art works exactly vertical and the height of the support can be varied easily. Otherwise, squaring up the camera wrt to the art work will have to be done for every object.
Are any of your objects “3D” works? If so, you might want to come up with a rotatable support, since you will probably want to shoot them from several equi-spaced angles. If these are ceramics (typical), you will definitely need polarized lights and filter to get rid of specular highlights!!
Oops - make that black shading cloth in front of you camera TWICE as big as your largest object.
Last edited by AstroDave; 02-23-2017 at 10:22 AM.
Reason: correct an error
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