Photographing my recent paintings today. I could paint better and work better if I could focus on that alone, but there are so many other jobs, the filing, framing, and this, scanning/photography of the work.
My technique is slow, complex and still not perfect. All of my days seem to be frustrating and imperfect. I can only aspire to get better with better procedures and techniques, based on logic and careful application rather than relying on mere knowing, which can come and go.
Ten years ago I used a £30 Canon 'Lide 30' Flatbed scanner which I'd modified to remove the plastic edge, leaving a glass pane to place the art on. This worked well, and produced better results than my current Epson scanner which is so poor quality (banding, not calibratable) that it's almost useless for art. In my experience, Epson make terrible scanners and printers, and Canon the best. Scanning always has some problems with banding or sensor quality, so this is not ideal. A huge scanner, the size of the painting which can be calibrated might be ideal. Perhaps museums use this, but who knows, it would need to be a rare and custom built machine, and kept in almost sterile conditions to stop dust, and of course, a room that is at least the size of the painting.
Now I use a Canon DSLR camera and photograph in segments, about 1.2m away from the work with a 50mm lens. The camera points down and the painting lies flat, facing up. The problem is being able to move the camera but keeping it 100% perpendicular to the painting surface. At the moment I use an aluminium rail for vertical motion and slide the painting itself for horizontal. This works reasonably well, but the vertical sliding of the camera can vey slightly change the left/right angle, and even a slight movement can upset the image accuracy. This is also rather time consuming, as everything needs to be set up very accurately. Because the painting moves, the lighting will change for that section, so I take a photograph of a plain white sheet and use this in post processing to lighten the painting correctly.
The results are good, but only perhaps as good as the old 'Lide 30' system. Photography does give a slightly softer look, which can look prettier, but doesn't seem as detailed. Generally the colour matching is a lot better on camera, almost instantly perfect, and of course there is no banding or graphic artefacts which are impossible or very time consuming to fix on a scanner. Scanning an artwork in sections was also very time consuming, it probably took longer and was more dangerous. Today, for example, I photographed The Starcrossed Escape which needed 6 sections, two works which needed two, and 4 works in one, and this took only 90 minutes or so (for the photography, the subsequent computer work took several hours). One single, multi-section work using the scanner often took an 8-hour day.
So, I need to develop an even better system, certainly a rail that locks the camera in pure vertical mode, and perhaps that can slide horizontally too (a tripod on wheels?).
