Photographing Artwork with a Copy Frame (update)

Somewhere along the line (with window 10 updates I suspect) lightroom became very flackey in tethered mode (at first I suspected the canon drivers, but installing updates just made the problem worse). Thus the benefits of my repurposed copy stand connected to the computer evaporated. It was back to clicking the shutter button. However I soon discovered using my little Olympus, with the tilt screen set up at a suitable viewing angle  could let me regain a little of the productivity. I could use the touch screen to both select focus and/or trigger the shutter.  So it was back to -

1. Position the art work.
2. Check the screen, perhaps refocus...
3. Tap the screen again to take a photo.
4. onto the next artwork…

Still considerably faster than scanning.

I like to use an mid grey background (matte board), to avoid the colour and/or tone biasing the artwork (particularly useful in preserving the white of the paper in sketches)

Using the OI.share app I can also set up my phone, Using remote control to get a live view from the camera, set all the key controls, focus and take the shot. All that is required is to set up the camera to connect to my phone via WiFi. I loose the screen view on the back of the camera but can see everything on the phone. I’m not sure it is any faster than just using the touch screen but it does remove the possibility of moving the copy stand as I tap the screen. It is also a bit of geeky fun, think of it as wireless tethering to your phone.

One big advantage of using OI.share on your phone is you can then post the captured image directly to instagram from the camera (and/or go through snapseed if you want to incorporate edits )

Yet another Reason to Photograph Art, rather than a scanner

I’ve been using the built in scanner in my HP Photosmart printer (an A4 typical all-in-one style inkjet) for my INKtober works. However yesterday’s included some Fluro acrylic paint to match my grand daughters pattern on her school art project (a hand painted mould of her hand), I a strang loop self reference sort or manner I decided to use that as my subject for my INKtober sketch for today,

I remembered that I had had trouble scanning the fluro colours before (on my beach people project) so I also took a photo (under artifical light). The differences are again shocking!

I probably should have waited for natural light and/or worked on the white balance but the camera (images on the right) gives a much better representation of the feel of my art work and closer to the true colours.

More on Photographing Art … with a Cameraphone

Anne-Laure Jacquart of “following the White Rabbit” on you tube has a couple of quirky but easy to follow video guides on the important steps using a cameraphone to photograph and post process your art (eg tidy up, straighten etc) and it is primarily oriented to getting your art looking its best when to posting on instagram or other social platforms.

It is worth following her around her flat and her fast french accented delivery, particularly how to best use natural daylight, where to find the good light and avoiding distortion by holding the camera parallel to the art. Lots of god advice explained by doing it.

In this second video she demonstrates the adjustments using snapseed, which can still be downloaded for free from both Itunes store and google play. (If you don’t have it yet now is a good time to try it out). However the steps can be applied is most image or photo editors around today,

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If you are into watercolours and/or urban sketching, or just eed to get a creativity boost follow Anne-Laure on Instagram &/or YouTube

Could AI help Photographing Art

Well after all it is my new “toy”, sorry I should have said tool. Will AI (Artificial Intelligence) be of help when photographing art?

I have found that photolemur generally does better on the olympus RAW (.orf) files, and as I generally take RAW + jpeg I did have a RAW version of my multimedia sketch (I’d used in the previous comparison).

And It did! The creases are a consequence on my folding the original A3 to get the sketch to fit on my A4 scanner. Otherwise we are getting much much closer to the original,  improvement id exposure and colour rendering but not perfect reproduction yet.

Looking at Photographing Art Works (again)

I have known for a while that my conventional flatbed printer/scanner doesn’t do a particularly good job of photographing coloured art works. (BTW Its fine for ink line drawings such as cartoons)

Last night I went to a great talk by Wayne Degenhardt at the Watercolour Society of Victoria, about Photographing Art. This inspired me to take some photos of my multimedia sketch I created at the Discover Nature through Drawing workshop last week, because I was a little disappointed with the scan, it was flat and very pale.

The results shocked me!

I haven’t gone to a lot of trouble to make this a scientific comparison, the cropping and rotation are inconsistent for a start. Further, the results are all jpegs, straight out of camera with only cropping but importantly all taken under the same lighting conditions. Upper left is the conventional scan (on a HP 8110 Photosmart printer) The apper left is my Android HTC 11 Cameraphone. The lower left is camera on my HP Spectre Tablet. The lower right is the jpeg from my Olympus OMD EM10iii.

So which is best?  Well, none really! If I had to choose one it would be the cameraphone but i’d have to lighten and correct the colour f the background. I can see further investigation is required here.

Roadtrips, the Death of Creativity & the Continuous Sketch

I had the brilliant idea back when I started planning this year long project, to build a series of sketches into a continuous panorama. Each place I visited should form part of the total picture, they thus needed to loosely join each other (eg match horizon and tonal blends. So I recognized that occasionally and intermediate image might be needed for a difficult transition.

I soon found out this wasn’t a particularly original idea, but I wasn’t deterred. I even experimented with a few sketches to get the best size (which was quarter watercolour sheets, around 28 by 18cm and in landscape mode. I even though these could be scanned and reduced onto cards. However there was a bit of a time oversight, on the road and travelling (Australia) is a big country and getting between places I wanted to visits take a lot of time) left no time to stop and work on the idea. So very few sketches got completed. If I tried to remember what the road trip saw a few days later I could perhaps describe it but not draw it convincingly. Clearly my visual memory requires a bit of time to work. So I gave my canon to my wife and said take pictures out the window every now and them as we passed through different country. Ok, Now I have a lot of blurred photos.

The photographer is not to blame, my wife has a good eye for what to photograph. It is the speed of car travel, and trying to anticipate the gaps between tress, landposts and countless other obstacles. Still I should be able to take a trees from here the tone and texture from another and the colour balance perhaps from a thirds. Again sounded simple but I always ended up trying to slavishly copy the little amount of detail I could get in the glimpse of in focus landscape.

Then I realized something important, that has be nagging at me for a long time now. I find it very hard to start a painting from a single photo. I’m much happier is I have a sketch I have made, even if it is a very simple composition or tonal layout study. I’m not convinced I’m alone here. Perhaps the time to sketch slows you down an ramps up your visual seeing rather than the symbolic seeing, as the landscape flashes by.  Further the act of drawing reinforces that visual sight and lets you focus on the important aspects of creating something. You come tp terms with the detail that is not required and are happy to leave it, whereas the snapshot records it as if it is important.

However, I’ve lost enthusiasm for the continuous sketch project. So The moral is…

Lots of driving and no drawing kills creativity

More Observations on Photographing Art

I have previously hinted that photographing art might be superior to using a flatbed scanner (well at least the ones built into most multifunction printers). Well I now have a strong case to confirm this suspicion. I have been working on a series of mixed media painting I’ve called the “Summer People” for my larger Endless Summer Project. Whilst I have left the people blank (they are only temporary visitors to the beach) I decided They need to have coloured clothes, and fluro colours are still popular with the summer people. However when I scanned these I was amazed… The fluro colours were flat and very pale. I’ve been looking for an explanation about the direction of light or quality of the light source but I have none to explain this observation. Taking a Photograph the same painting (images on the right below) in daylight the colours are much truer including the non-fluro ones.
  
The main advantage of a flat bed scanner is it (in theory) avoids dimensional distortion, such as non paralleled edges produced when the camera is tilted. I did make an old fashion copy stand out of an old enlarger mounting and can connect my canon camera to my studio computer in tethered remote live view mode (see below). The image is upside down here because of the way the camera is mounted on the stand and because the painting is facing me. I could fix this by putting the painting upside down on the table top or just as easy fix in while post processing in lightroom, I can also focus and control exposure from the computer and once I have every thing set up just slide the canvases one at a time check focus and exposure and click. Its actually faster than loading a scanner closing the cover and click then waiting for the scan, Looking at the preview screen doing adjustments (like rotation) and loading the next canvas…

I also need to be careful not to use a zoomed in or wide angle lens, which can cause barreling (curved rather than straight edges to the canvas) A focal length between 50 and 70mm on my crop sensor canon avoids distortion so I have to adjust the camera height up of down to best frame the picture. In this case I lifted the copy stand onto an adjacent counter top.


Another issue with using a camera, is there is less control of the light source and a colour cast can be common. I prefer to only photograph art (and in fact only paint) in daylight. Not direct sunlight but a strong diffuse light such as a window. Even so the colour of the room and its contents will affect the light so it is also wise to consider white balance. By taking RAW format this can easily and well adjusted in post processing. I therefore take a calibration photo using just a commercial colour wheel and one of my notan (greyscale) cards.

In this case the test is a little “warm” but may be acceptable. I use lightroom and it has a very decent Auto White Balance, in this case it is colder and more clinical, but better colours and grey scale. You can manually adjust the degree of correction but I’m happy to go with the auto correction. Further lightroom lets to refine the adjustments on one image and then copy that to all others captured at the same time.

I prefer to leave room on the margin to allow for trimming later and to individually crop and rotate each picture (again its easy in lightroom) but if you are copying a lot of items the same you could put masking tape as location makers and then fill the frame and have the cropping automated as well.

I am pleased. Using my DSLR canon camera, mounted on my homemade copy stand and tethered to my studio computer, I can reliably and quickly get superior copies to those achieved with a flat bed scanner. By also taking a calibration shot, and photographing in RAW format and then post processing in lightroom, I can also automated white balance and minor exposure adjustments across a whole series of images. Giving me much better and consistent set of images of my art to post on-line.