I like to paint miniatures, and I appreciate the difference that you get from photographing them with a proper light set up. Sadly, the setup that I had for those is far too small to fit a canvas into, so I had to set up a less conventional rig. Thankfully I’ve got a better idea of how I want to take photographs in the future, so I think it will go a bit smoother. The most difficult part for me was getting my camera set up to be perfectly parallel with the piece I was photographing. I’ve found a tripod since, so hopefully that will also be a problem of the past.

I have to say, I have a great respect for my photographer friend who knows all there is to know about lighting and how to position and what lights to use. Of course, she has better access to lighting equipment than I do, I have my lamps and my tables.

Not being a painter, and definitely not one for color, I decided to paint one of my own for this assignment. It has promise, and acrylics drive me a little nuts because of how they dry. I’ve painted figurines before, 3D, but never flat. :/

Anyway, the paintings I photographed, the first one is one that my great grandparents bought from a man in Hawaii, he no longer lives unfortunately, but he captured the light so well. I figured I’d try this one out, and I have to say the softer lights that I have actually contribute to the feel of the piece.  

The second piece is one I made. Like I said I’m not good with all the tricks in the books, just what I’ve practiced when ‘painting’ on charcoal in my drawings. The light was not friendly to it, I think if I went and got several other lights and played with softening pure daylight instead of using the halogens and fluorescents that I have the colors in this would pop much better, and the feathering wouldn’t look so ‘yellow’. Funny how the hues of a light will absorb into the painting, which is what I learned with this type of lighting.

Light definitely reflects horribly as well, and casts shadows. Grr.

I painted this for one of my beginning painting first assignments. I am not a huge painter, I can honestly say that I have never really painted before. I am huge into photography however, my batteries are dead in my camera so I took this photo with my iPhone 6. I also only have one painting so far and was not able to go anywhere to find more. Its defiantly a working in progress for me to paint but I am still learning.  

  For this weeks work I used to pieces that are near and dear to my heart. The one on the left is a depiction of the relationship between the moon, sun, and ocean. It was created on canvas using, acrylic paint, watercolor, metallic sharpie, and sand for texture; I created it about a year ago for a midterm. The second piece a friend of mine created, it is a Lino block cut on Japanese paper using Daniel Smith ink.  I think this weeks assignment was not particularly difficult, because I have been photographing my art for several year.

The first picture I have is my son’s art.   He’s almost two and colors like a mad man, so I chose to use his to try to see how all of the individual colors would photograph.   The lighting was the hardest part, I think.   I used natural light coming in from the door in front of it off to the left hand side.   All in all, I think it lit nicely, but the left side is slightly darker than the right.   Adding any lights I had around the house just made it worse.   I had my ISO at 400, with my aperture at f/2.5 and my shutter speed at 1/5 of a second and my camera on a tripod.   In photoshop, I used the white balance correction tool in Camera Raw by picking the brightest part on the paper and found that was pretty sufficient.   I also turned up the vibrance and the contrast just a bit.

The second picture is acrylic on canvas and was shot in the same lighting conditions and the same exposure, except that I had the shutter speed slightly slower at 1/3 of a second.   This one was easier to shoot than my son’s (probably because my son’s was a thinner sheet of paper and popping off the wall here and there).   I had to do a couple of quick edits in photoshop to get the color to match the painting itself.   The photo of the painting made it look slightly cooler-toned than the actual painting so I manually adjusted the temperature.   I also used the Hue/Saturation tool to take down some of the red because it was looking to purple-ish and that is what fixed it.   I also bumped up the contrast and think this is really close to the actual painting itself!

Here’s my images for the first lesson. Unfortunately I’m very sick at the moment so I was only able to get a photograph of one piece of artwork, the other is digital.

On the photographed piece, the trickiest part was getting it aligned perpendicular in front of the DSLR since it’s out of a sketchbook. I ended up setting it up on an art easel and using black clips to hold the page down.

These two paintings are ones I did for two separate “come and paint” parties, you know the ones where a bunch of people get together to drink wine and paint a picture based on the instruction of the artist teaching the lesson. I took both pictures with a ISO of 100 on auto.   I used the daylight feature for the Sugar Skull on the left, and the incandescent feature (tungsten) for the Cherry Blossom Tree on the right.

With the Sugar Skull painting, I had a little trouble with the cropping after I did the auto contrast, because my corners weren’t lining up very well, and I had to retake the picture multiple times to get the best image to crop. I then added a little more green for the color balance and added more contrast.

The Cherry Blossom Tree I did more adjusting to, because the tungsten feature really darkened the image andthe blues and whites of the background almost blended together. After I did the auto contrast and cropped it, which was easier as it was my second image attempt, I sharpened the contrast and added more saturation and vibrance. All those adjustments helped some but when I exposed it more and lessened the offset level, it made significant difference. I then used the constrast 1,2,3 levels and darkened the midtones. The last thing I did was add more red again to try to bring out the blossoms on the branches and ground.

The only problems I had were trying to figure out how to take the pictures at the right angles and with the right amount of light, and how to save the files so I could upload them into the post. It took me a few tries, but finally succeeded.

These paintings are both by me. I love to paint, but unfortunately I’ve never made one I’m fully satisfied with. The first one is of a dream I had where I was starring up at a galaxy sky filled with huge clouds.  I couldn’t quite transfer my dream onto the canvas as well as I wanted to. The second is Ghost Town fan art I attempted. I know, that lazy eye..I couldn’t fix it. I experimented with fstops, apertures and other settings. I had fun messing with the settings. I had a hard time accessing the different settings because the camera I have is quite new to me. I can’t remember the exact settings I had when I took these pictures but I know the fstops were around F10-F14.

So these two pieces were a sort of challenge within their own certain ways. This was mostly because of my resources, but I made them work.

The first piece is a drawing of Audrey Hepburn. This piece is very close to my heart, so I wanted to really try and get it perfectly captured. The natural lighting coming into my house today is sort of muddled and not the most vibrant, so I paired it was lamps that I have, using the warmest looking lightbulbs I could find. The bad thing about this picture was it still looked a little cold. So I heightened the saturation on the pictures, but that didn’t work very well either. I settled with boosting the warmth of the picture rather than the saturation, but then lightening the picture itself to get rid of the slightly yellow hue to the paper.

This second piece was another challenge. It was easy to photograph, using the same method of lamps (which I didn’t mention how I positioned them.) I tried from either side but was getting weird shadows on the edges of the paper, so I positioned one lamp below and then held another lamp up above it. The shadows went away, thankfully. Anyways, this picture had a problem with the editing as well. The piece is done primarily in small strokes of a Bic ball-point pen, so their somewhat hard to see. I wanted each line to stand out, but once I boosted the contrast, everything felt muddy and artificial. I restarted but this time darkened the shadows about 80% and then lightened the highlights to about 15% and the end result was to my liking.

*I was unaware how to categorize the post until today! Sorry! I posted this Saturday, though!