Digitising your art for posterity

When I was still making art, I used to be absolutely fastidious about recording its creation digitally - as it progressed and then again at the end and then saving it in different file formats. 

As I got more experienced, I started looking more into the "how to get a good image" and "how to photograph your art"

I was rather overwhelmed by the fact that, back in the 1990s, the first time I engaged a photographer to photograph my art, I ended up in her studio with black cloth everywhere, the lights off and her hand holding one of those clicker things which takes the picture. They were jolly good images! Pity we weren't doing digital then....

Many artists are now very interested in making sure they get good quality images of their artwork either through digital scanning or via digital photography - primarily so they can reproduce their art in different ways for ancillary sales.

Subsequently, I got very interested in collecting information about how to photograph your own art and everything I found at the time ended up on this page How to Photograph Art - for Artists on my Art Business Info for Artists website.   

Which is how I ended up with Case Studies like this......

Many thanks toYanny Petters for the action shot of her husband 
photographing her art outside on a bright but overcast day with no shadows

I'm now a member of the Chelsea Physic Garden Florilegium Society. The Society is currently involved in digitising its archive of botanical illustrations of the plants growing in the Chelsea Physic Garden.

This is the latest post on the CPGFS Instagram Account of the activities of the British Museum imaging department who have been engaged to digitise the @cpgflorilegiumsociety Archive Collection.  

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A post shared by Chelsea Physic Garden Florilegium Society (@cpgflorilegiumsociety)

 

Note the critical features:

• the artwork is surrounded by a black background
• a colour card is nearby
• the very good camera is on a tripod so it is completely steady
• the camera is angled down so as to get the artwork exactly at right angles (basically the angle of the lens is the same as the slope of the support for the artwork) 
• shutter release is electronic and on a wire - so no need to touch the camera - which means it stays precisely at "the right angle" all the time.

What you can't see will be the lighting which ensures the artwork has a clean bright light on it to bring out the colour but without making it seem washed out. 

Now this is an expert digital team doing this.

But you can learn a lot from this image and most of it you can replicate yourself if you want to. For example, it's worth swopping bulbs at home to get a better light to photograph in. That's if you don't want to buy lights for photographing artwork....

Next time you're photographing your artwork, why not try and do it better?

Have a read of my page - noted above - there's lots of helpful tips and it's always there to refer to!