Several years ago there was a delightful commercial that featured a young boy about 5 years old eating his favorite cereal.  The announcer was trying to entice the little boy to give him a taste by promising all sorts of presents.  The boy continued to chow down on the bowl of breakfast each time mumbling between bites “no” and shaking his head in disapproval to each of the offerings.  Then the announcer said, “I’ll make your sister disappear.”  The boy paused, cleared his mouth swallowing his morsel, reflected on the tempting offer and said, “I have twoooo sista’s.”  🙂  I have only one and now that I’m well beyond my child cereal days find she is invaluable.

I promised my sister that when I was over to her house I would photograph her work so that she could start a portfolio book of her art.  Since retiring as a designer from a prestigious furniture company, she has once more taken up her painting and is ready to sell her work again.  I’m not trained in photography with artificial lighting, nor do I have a studio that would allow me to do this with the precision of those who have specialized in the craft.

Being a firm believer that the impression you create with a potential buyer is essential to your marketplace image, a simple snapshot with available tungsten or on-camera lighting just wouldn’t do.  Why should she create her masterful paintings and then present them with the horrible resolution, lens distortion, and hot flash points of a point-and-shoot?  Not me, and I wasn’t going to let my sister settle for this.

So I had a dilemma.  How was I going to deliver on my promise without going out and spending a king’s ransom on off-camera lighting and special braces for the paintings that ensured an exact parallel relationship of the subject to the camera lens while maintaining contrast and true color reproduction?  Aha, High Dynamic Range Imaging, or for short HDR.  Simply put, HDR is a technique that extends the limited dynamic range of most cameras’ exposure values.  [More on HDR in a future blog.] It can be accomplished in many ways, but the most effective I find is using one of several software applications that were designed specifically for this purpose.  For this exercise I used Photomatix.  By extending the exposure values beyond the limits of most camera meters, you can capture greater detail in both shadows and highlights without averaging-out the metered light that flattens contrast.  The result is greater sharpness throughout the spectrum of light and a truer reproduction of color resolution.  My only other challenge was to eliminate lens distortion by assuring my camera was exactly parallel to the painting’s canvas.

I got up to capture early morning light.  I put her easel outside but under the eaves of her front patio protecting the subjects from direct reflective sun, assuring I was shooting with indirect sunlight.  I put my portrait zoom lens onto my Nikon D700, adjusted the Really Right Stuff ball head until I eliminated any lens distortion which I presumed would be a close approximation of parallel to the canvas and then shot HDR bracketed shots in RAW.  I thought I was going to whiz through this and be out of there by mid-morning.  No such luck; however, in the day long process of developing the shots in the digital darkroom with my sister at my side suggesting corrections in contrast, color, and compositional emphasis I learned a great deal more about an artists craft and how it could be applied to photography.  She doesn’t have computer skills, but can evaluate colors and shades with the laser precision of an artist.  She gave me directions on the corrections that were needed to bring the painting to life and I then translated them into Photomatix and Photoshop techniques.  In this manner I learned more about controlling light in an image and how to use them to the best effect…even if that meant I was there through dinner and beyond.  We spent the entire day on only a baker’s dozen of images.  Could a photographer who specializes in photographing art have done better?  Probably, but our own home brewed method worked out just fine.

Halfway through our project she urged me to buy an oil paint starter kit.  The purpose was to better understand how the mixing of different hues affects the overall tone and contrast of colors.  I’m tempted but fear its outcome will be a bunch of stick figures fishing along a two dimensional stream with a dark green background and flat blue sky.   Drawing is not my forté, which is why I chose photography as my aesthetic outlet, but I figure it’s at least worth a try so long as it doesn’t become another expensive hobby.  I wonder?  Do I need to buy a smock and beret too?

There is one challenge that I wasn’t able to fully control.  If her painting was framed under glass, I had a dickens of a time avoiding reflections. I wasn’t able to fully solve the problem and only came near to mitigating the glare by placing the easel and painting in a darkened corridor of the house then bracketing my HDR shots starting at an overexposure of 30 seconds working my way up by 6 more f/stops of faster exposure values; making a bracket of 7 shots in all.  Despite dampening the glare, the glass still gives the pastel painting an unnatural sheen.  Surely a skilled photographer with studio lights would have done a better job, but still I think it was passable for a portfolio shot of 8 ½ by 11.  Taking this painting out of the frame was OUT OF THE QUESTION.  So I did the best with the restrictions I had.

If there’s a moral to this story it is that there is an effective way to photograph art in suboptimal conditions with limited equipment, and if you can do your digital darkroom work with the artist alongside not only will you be able to recreate an image closer to the original, you’ll learn a great deal more about mixing colors and art itself through the prism of a painter’s mind making you a better photographer.  However, a modicum of digital darkroom know-how is required.

Lunch was pizza and dinner was shepherd’s pie and a cabernet.  Not bad compensation for a hard day’s work.