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"How to Photograph Flat Art"
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Author: Rick_Lee, Contributing Editor

You are an artist. You need photographs or slides or digital images of your paintings, drawings, or whatever. You get out your camera and you take a picture and it looks something like this:
Rats... that pesky flash reflection. What to do? Use your head... think about this problem logically.

LIGHTING

We could take the piece of art out of the frame and get rid of the glass. That might help, but it might not, especially if is a painting with a glossy surface.  I have purposely chosen to illustrate this tutorial using a framed piece of art with glass on it... which is the most difficult of circumstances.  If the flash is reflecting, what say we turn off the flash and put the camera on a tripod and shoot the art using the room light. Your resulting photo might look something like this:

Darn... the room light is lighting up the photographer as well as the art so the photographer and the ceiling and everything else in the room is visible in the reflection.
Let's get a light which we can direct at the art from the side at a 45 degree angle, so that unlike the flash-on-camera, the light will not reflect back into the lens. Do we need something really expensive from a camera store? No, something simple from the Home Depot will work just as well... something with a reflector for directing the light... like this work-light:
Don't wait - discuss this topic with fellow artists now in our forum!
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