I’m taking the plunge and trying to sell some of my art locally. The market here is different than I’m used to, and mainly I will be marketing my work at art fairs. For this, I need to have prints made of some of my work. (I’ll also be selling originals, but from talking to some other artists it would be wise for me to have prints, also.) Again, things are weird here and so far I have not been able to find anyone that is capable of scanning large works and printing them, so I’m looking into getting a camera that can take photos of high enough resolution to make prints from. My biggest pieces are 30"x22" and I’d like to be able to print that big, but if that isn’t economically feasible then being able to print at about 16"x20" would be good, also.
I really don’t know that much about photography, and I guess I could just hire someone who already has a good camera to photograph this stuff for me, but then every time I do a new painting I’d have to have them come out, and I just don’t like dealing with people that much.
Nice art!
I’m not exactly sure how to advise you as I don’t know how much about photography you want to learn right now.
You will need to light the work of art and you’ll need good color reproduction. (that is from the camera you buy, your computer where you edit the file and your printer) And you’ll need to have a lens that won’t distort the image, especially at the edges.
It may be easier to see if you can hire a photographer in the area to do this for you.
Any of the current crop of DSLRs will work. The hard part is getting the lighting correct, even and without reflections. You may nee to set aside a large work area for photographing these pieces.
But Okinawa is not in a third-world country: there probably are photographic services there that could do the job!
Lighting is one issue, since you don’t want the light sources’ reflections in the picture. Another issue is that you need to set up your camera so that it is exactly lined up with the centre of the picture, and so that you don’t get any distorted perspective. So a tripod is almost essential.
I know there’s a formula that tells you how many megapixels it takes to print a certain size with good sharpness, but I don’t have it on hand. I can, however, tell you that my 8mp camera does a great job with 13X19*. It may do well with bigger sizes as well, but that’s as big as my printer goes.
I don’t actually have anything useful to add, the thread title just made me think of The Gigapxl Project. Check out the “image gallery” section- those are some really BIG prints.
Not long ago nobody would even think of a digital camera for this. Times have changed, I guess.
To get excellent quality prints approaching a yard in size would probably want a view camera, maybe a 4X5, exposing glass plates. Horseman is a major brand. View cameras up to 8X10 are pretty common and they’ve been made much bigger.
You might get satisfactory results with a medium format camera, a Mamiya, a Hasselblad, something of this nature. Pentax makes a funny looking one, fairly reasonably priced, that looks like a 35mm SLR only about twice as big in every dimension. It might look like a SciFi movie prop the first time you see one.
The human eye brain system is very good at noticing the nature of the object you’re looking at and ignoring the nature of the light (color, shadows, glare) falling on it, and also ignoring the perspective shifts associated with viewing angle. But a picture of your artwork will capture all of these characteristics without subjective bias, and the unintended ones become parts of the nature of the photograph. You WILL notice the effects then, looking at the photograph. If you are very particular about your art or intend to sell prints to people who may be very particular, you would need to learn quite a lot about lighting and exposure and also get good practical skills manipulating photographic equipment. You probably will need to spraypaint a bunch of junk from your kitchen drawer in flat white, and take pictures of it with all kinds of lights and tapemeasures and exposure meters, and cogitate over it all for quite some time to do this well. It might be a wonderful growth experience for what you see in the world, or it might be a complete and total derailment.
It ought to be obvious that somebody that is already a photographer would be overoptimistic if they decided to paint paintings of their photos. It is debatable whether excellent photography is easier or harder than excellent painting. I’d tend to agree that the same effort would take anybody further with a camera than with a brush, but it’s not a cakewalk.
To get some idea of these things, check out books by Ansel Adams or Fred Picker (especially “The Fine Print”) or Minor White, and look into the “Zone System”.
Just a suggestion, but perhaps you could go to a few art shows first, and ask the other artists how they had prints of their work made? There may be a company that does that for them that you could just contract with. I’m thinking the investment in both time, money, and effort won’t be feasible for you.
Keep in mind that all pixels are not equal. You can buy a relatively small P&S camera with 12 MP images that would be enough to print a decent 24x30 image in a perfect world. But that image wouldn’t be as clean or noise-free as an image from a DSLR which has a much bigger CCD.
But as others have said, the hard part is getting the correct lighting, exposure, and angles. This is not a trivial exercise, nor is it cheap. But I agree with the suggestion that finding a photographic shop that can scan your art will give you much better overall images to print from.
How did you get your current set of images? Did you photograph them yourself?
I have to disagree here. Glass plates, even? You can barely get those anymore. Your suggestions are serious overkill. First, view camera gear is stupendously expensive to purchase and operate. Large format film is expensive too, and so is processing, which is hard to find nowadays and often requires using a mail-order lab to process and scan. View cameras are also much more complex than everyday cameras and have no automation. Medium format gear is more reasonably priced but still harder to use and expensive. Film, in general, is going to be too much trouble and too expensive for someone with little to no photographic experience.
For the OP’s uses, a 10+ MP DSLR with a macro lens and a copy stand will be sufficient. A D80 and the 60mm Micro-Nikkor lens, or the new 12 MP Canon XSi and the 60mm EF-S Macro lens are about $1500 US. The copy stand won’t be cheap, though, especially for a big one. The copy stand has a flat base and a set of lights to provide even illumination, and an adjustable head for holding the camera. It’s probably going to be $700-1000, depending on size and whether you buy new or used. A small one though, good for sizes around 8x10, shouldn’t be more than $400.
Overall, unless you plan on doing this frequently or have a pressing need for immediate results, I have to second the recommendation for finding a repro service or a local photographer with the ability to do large copy work. The equipment is expensive and will have a learning curve for decent results.
The OP is printing artwork, not photos, so the regular resolution needs are relaxed. The normal rule of 300 ppi for high-quality prints only applies if the source actually has 300 ppi of distinguishable detail. The samples provided by the OP do not appear to have the fine detail that photographs do, so less resolution will be required to make a good copy. The equipment I suggested will give highly usable results around 24x20, and should also give good results at the 30" size.
>I’m taking the plunge and trying to sell some of my art locally.
>I have to disagree here. Glass plates, even? You can barely get those anymore. Your suggestions are serious overkill.
Gee, Cleophus, I think I have to agree with you.
If an artist is actually selling large prints of their art, that is, if that’s their product, then quality and nuance could be everything. But on rereading I see “taking the plunge” to mean that we are not advising a major artist on a keystone issue, we’re helping somebody try this out. And, you’re right, glass plates in a view camera are serious overkill for somebody’s first try.
I remembered an article from years ago about a Polaroid view camera that was something like 20" by 30", specifically designed for photographing paintings. My suggestions were consistent with the gist of that article. But, the Polaroid, with its portfolio-sized film packages and all, was targeted at art museums that were photographing Mona Lisas and Starry Nights, not a Doper taking the plunge.
Thanks for the input and complements, everyone. The photos I’ve got now were taken by me, on a sony DSC-N1 (8.1mp), then cropped color-corrected a bit with picasa. I was definitely seeing distortion at the edges of the images, and it made cropping tricky and inaccurate.
This is not a third world country, but it is a very small island and you’d be surprised how hard it is to get some things done here. Some of it is language barrier–I don’t speak enough Japanese to communicate at this level, and very, very few Okinawans speak English, so it’s a problem–but mostly they just don’t have stuff here. It’s frustrating.
I have spoken with one other artist at the shows (the only non-photographer there–these are not big affairs) and she prints her stuff out at home on an inkjet. Frankly, the quality just isn’t there, and I would not be comfortable selling the quality of prints I could get from my personal printer.
It looks like it’s going to be too big of an investment in time and money to get the equipment and knowledge I need to do this myself right now, so I think I’ll continue to photograph the small pieces myself with the camera I have and use an online printer to get the prints, and either not offer large prints, or have a professional photographer take the photos for the large prints only.
Again, thanks for the input. I’ll be saving this thread for when I become a “serious” artist and decide to learn how to do it right.
You might be able to improve your results if you use good technique. You’ll want to keep the subject out of the areas of highest distortion - use the middle of the zoom range, don’t frame too tightly and keep the image out of the corners, and make sure the camera is absolutely parallel with the subject (use a tripod). If you shoot outside in full, direct sunlight you’ll get very constant, even light over the subject. Use an ISO of 64 (don’t use Auto) and manually set the white balance to “Daylight”. Be sure not to accidentally cast a shadow with your body or equipment.
I think you should experiment with the camera you have. Atripod is an absolute must, so spend the money on that first if you don’t have one. You might also want to spend some money on lighting and gels if you can’t eliminate reflections/shiny spots under your present shooting conditions.
Many if not most Kinkos have very large printers that will print off a roll. At my local one, you gan get a print 42" wide by, well, very very long.
The main problem I had was color matching. The Kinko’s printout didn’t match my originals – they were pretty close but original reds showed up a little orangey in the final copy. You can mess with your original files some, or have them print some samples of pure colors to get a sense of what difference if any there will be. Don’t be afraid to digitally retouch your pics to make them more closely resemble the original art. It is likely to be much much cheaper than buying top of the line photo and lighting gear, not to mention the time spent learning professional photographic skills.
Here’s something I’ll suggest trying that a loy of purists wouldn’t do, but it worked very well for me. If your printouts are too grainy, you can open them in Photoshop and resize the image, and specify the pixel density. This will add more pixels by interpolating what colors should be added between the existing pixels. It really works very well with solid colors, or single colors contrasting with a solid color background, as it appears some of your work is. OTOH, it doesn’t work so well if you have lots of color changes within a small area. Here is one of my pieces interpolated up to about 58mp. The original was created using 3 images taken with a 3mp camera and layered over each other in Photoshop. (These were actually the original art of 3 different artists that I made into something completely unrecognizeable from any ofthe3 originals. )Here’s a scaled down version so you can see the whole thing. That’s about 300 pixels per inch for the inal printout, which was about 20"x28". IMO it looks terrific framed on my wall.
30"x22" at 300ppi it’s 9000 pixels by 6600 pixels. That is, 9 megapixels.
If you have a camera capable of that or higher, and preferably not one that will use the flash or otherwise interfere with taking a clear picture, then that should be enough.
