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You are an artist. You need photographs or slides or digital images of your paintings, drawings, or whatever. You get out your camera and you take a picture and it looks something like this:
Rats... that pesky flash reflection. What to do? Use your head... think about this problem logically. LIGHTING We could take the piece of art out of the frame and get rid of the glass. That might help, but it might not, especially if is a painting with a glossy surface. I have purposely chosen to illustrate this tutorial using a framed piece of art with glass on it... which is the most difficult of circumstances. If the flash is reflecting, what say we turn off the flash and put the camera on a tripod and shoot the art using the room light. Your resulting photo might look something like this:
Darn... the room light is lighting up the photographer as well as the art so the photographer and the ceiling and everything else in the room is visible in the reflection. Let's get a light which we can direct at the art from the side at a 45 degree angle, so that unlike the flash-on-camera, the light will not reflect back into the lens. Do we need something really expensive from a camera store? No, something simple from the Home Depot will work just as well... something with a reflector for directing the light... like this:
Put a really high-wattage bulb in it (100 or 200 watt, if the lamp will take it) and turn it on. Turn off all the other room lights, close the blinds (or better yet, wait until night). We place the lamp to the left of the camera so that the reflection of the light will not be seen by the camera... great... we get something that looks like this:
Drat... the art is lit from one side so that it is lighter on one side than the other. This is known as "fall-off". This is no good. We need for it to be lit evenly. So, let's get 2 lamps and put one on the left and one on the right. We set up the lamps so that they are at 45 degree angles to the piece like this overhead view:
And we get something like this:
Much, much better. If we wanted to eventually crop out the frame and mat, we might shoot the picture much closer, like this:
So then we could crop the final photo as seen below. Cropping a digital photo is easy with software. You can crop a slide by removing the transparency film from the slide mount and masking around the image with thin, metallic tape called "slide masking tape". Then put the slide in a new slide mount. Plastic slide mounts and the tape are available from good photography stores.
You must be careful that the lights are illuminating the artwork but NOT the photographer or the camera.. Also, turn off all the room lights and close the curtains... make it as dark in the room as you can, or you might get something like this:
Can you see my arms and ball cap in the picture above? You must light the art, and nothing else that will reflect in the glass. If you are using a zoom lens, it is better to use the more telephoto setting so that the photographer will be farther away from the art. If you are using a more wide-angle zoom setting, the photographer will be closer to the art and thus more likely to be lit up by the light spilling from the lamps. Another way to help this problem is to get a piece of black mat board between the camera and the art... and cut a hole to stick the lens through. Great. But that's not all there is to it. We must discuss a few more things... EXPOSURE... if you are using a digital camera, you can easily look at the images quickly and determine if the images are too light or too dark. If you are using a 35mm camera and you are shooting negatives or slides, you must get the exposure correct. Particularly if you are shooting slide film, the exposure must be within one half stop. Negative film is more forgiving. When you take a light reading with your camera, the camera doesn't know if the painting is light or dark. It is assuming that the subject matter is middle grey. It tries to average everything out to be middle grey whether the piece is mostly white or mostly black. In photography stores, you can purchase what is called a "grey-card". No kidding. It's a piece of grey cardboard which is the exact shade of grey that your camera meter is looking for. You can hold it in front of the artwork and take a light reading from the card. Set the camera on "manual" so that when you take the card away, the setting will remain the same. If you are on "automatic", the camera will re-adjust. Here is a picture of a grey-card:
Even if you use a grey-card to take an exposure reading from, your slides still may be just a little bit light or dark. It is a good idea to "bracket" your exposures. This means, shoot some at the recommended exposure, but also shoot some 1/2 stop overexposed, shoot some 1 stop overexposed, shoot some 1/2 stop underexposed and shoot some 1 stop underexposed. If you find that you are never off by more than 1/2 stop, then eliminate the full stop brackets. If you find that your grey-card readings are always right on the money, then stop bracketing and wasting film. If you find that your grey-card readings are always 1/2 stop dark, then just open up 1/2 stop and don't bracket. You may want to actually take a photograph of the grey-card in front of a piece of art. Your color lab can use that photo to gauge your density (lightness/darkness) and color balance... which brings us to... COLOR BALANCE. If you are using a digital camera, you can change the setting for daylight (or daylight balanced flash) or incandescent light. The lights in your cheapo lamps from Home Depot will be incandescent. If you are shooting 35mm film, you might either use film that is balanced for incandescent such as Ektachrome Tungsten film or you might use a blue filter... called an 80B filter... to filter out the warm reddish-yellow light of the incandescent (tungsten) lamps. If you shoot daylight-balanced film (the normal kind) with incandescent lamps, your pictures will look like this:
If you want slides, I recommend a type of film called Ektachrome 64T. This is available from better photography stores. It is very sharp and is balanced for tungsten incandescent lights. If you want the absolute best in color balance, you might go to a camera store and get some BBA Photo Flood bulbs. These go in a standard household screw-in lamp base (such as the one I pictured above) but they are perfectly color balanced at 3200 (degrees Kelvin) which is what Ektrachrome 64T is balanced for. These are 250 watt bulbs. They burn out very quickly so don't waste them. You might also use "quartz halogen" lights. These go in special lamps and they are very bright... usually 500 to 1000 watts. Don't burn yourself. Halogen lights from the hardware store often have wire cages over the lamps. I suppose you'd have remove those cages to get even light on your art. Don't blame me if you burn yourself or catch your house on fire. They are usually color balanced at 3400K rather than 3200K but the difference is slight and you shouldn't notice a problem with the 64T film. A less likely scenario is that you might use some tungsten-balanced film with daylight or flash... just in case you wanted to know what would happen, that would look like this:
ALLIGNMENT You must try to get the camera lined up perfectly "square" with the art. That is, the film plane of the camera should be perfectly (as much as possible) parallel with the plane of the art with the lens pointing directly into the center of the piece. Otherwise, your rectangular art might come out looking like a trapezoid. If you were off a little bit to the left of center, then the left side of the art would be closer to the camera than the right side... so the left side would look bigger... like this exaggeration:
Naturally, if you are off to the right... the opposite would be true such as below:
If you have the art on an easel which has the art tilting back, you might see something like this:
If the art is tilting back, then the camera should be higher to allow the film plane to be parallel with the art. If the art is hanging on the wall from a nail, it might be tilting forward. So the camera would need to be lower to keep it square with the art. Using a longer (telephoto) lens helps you to keep the picture square. Small variations show up much more with wide-angle lenses than with telephoto. For instance, if you had a 28-100mm zoom lens, it would easier to square it up if you used the 100mm setting. PARALLAX and DISTORTION There is another problem called "parallax". Parallax is the problem you have if you are not using a single-lens-reflex camera (SLR). With an SLR, you are actually viewing through the same lens that you are shooting with. If you have a separate viewfinder, then what you see is a little bit displaced from what you actually get. An example of this would be to look at an object with one eye... then close that eye and look at it with your other eye. The difference is parallax. Cheaper lenses, particularly zoom lenses, often have problems reproducing rectangular images properly. You will sometimes see what is referred to as: "pincushion" and "barrel" distortion like this:
CAMERA STEADINESS Use a tripod to keep your camera steady. 64T is not high-speed film... you will need to support your camera on a tripod and use a slower shutter speed because the film speed is a low ISO 64. The low ISO speed of the film results in sharper images. Higher speed film is available such as Ektachrome 160T, but it is less sharp. It is also a good idea to use a cable release (an inexpensive item) when using long exposure times on a tripod. The cable-release will keep you from shaking your camera when you snap the shutter. This is a cable release:
ORIGINALS vs. COPIES If you want 5 slides, shoot 5 originals. Don't shoot one and get copies made. Slide copies are crap compared to originals and it costs less to shoot more originals.
NOTE: This tutorial is intended for the amateur photographer who is just getting started copying art. This does not begin to cover all of the intricacies that might bother someone doing this professionally. Stuff you will need:
Let me know if anything in this tutorial is unclear, and I will change it. (Text and photos and artwork © 2001 Richard S. Lee)
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