Photography

This section contains the informal notes from a January 2007 workshop on photographing art work. Many others have offered similar courses in much greater depth. Our attempt was to concentrate on using a single camera - Canon A710IS - known for its wide range of manual features and reasonable price, and use it to do a small range of similar tasks, photographing student artwork. The images will mostly be used on this web site, but may also be submitted for student portfolios, including printed material.

All of this came out of recent experiences reviewing slides and digital images submitted for recent juried shows. At Northwind in August, Mary Anne and I watched as the committee looked at 750 slides submitted for 75 openings. At least 30% of the 2d art was rejected solely because of poor slide quality. The juror simply could not judge the art because the images were so poor. 3d artists seemed to have learned the lesson, and fared better. Most of the photography efforts were excellent.

So, we’re guided by these basic principles:

  1. The images must be of high quality, and must accurately represent the art.
    1. Color must be accurate
    2. Images must be in focus
    3. Images must be cropped, to eliminate background detail
    4. Final images must support at least 4×6 inch prints at 300 dpi
    5. Keystoning (distortion due to perspective) must be corrected
  2. The process of setting up the equipment, taking the photos, making corrections in PhotoShop, and posting the results on the web must be easily automated, so that casual users can quickly get good results, and so that large numbers of images can be processed rapidly.
  3. All art must be treated with equal respect, whether a routine student assignment, or the months-long efforts of a seasoned professional.

Many of these steps will look long and involved. If you qualify a setup, and then re-use the configuratlon, you only need to do the steps once.

Finally, these notes are just a starting point; if you have photos or words that should be added, please e mail them to me and I’ll see they are incorporated. Let’s make this web resource one we can all use.

Jim