This oil painting by Scott Lloyd Anderson is an example of one of my more specialized services. I’ve been photographing oil paintings for Joe Paquet for a year now and over that time have upgraded cameras, purchased studio lights and have learned more about the behavior of light than I bargained for. Oil paintings present several challenges because they reflect light and cause little sparkly dots all over the image or worse, shinny gray where there should be black. As you can see above, the blacks are nice and solid.

Fine art landscape painters like Joe and Scott capture incredibly subtle variations in color. The accuracy of these colors are what give the painting air and a sense of space. The number of decisions they have to make while working is tremendous, it’s not just copying the local colors of the object, it’s the relationships of the colors and how they are effected by the light striking the object and how the light is changed by the atmosphere between the object and the observer. This is how you can tell if it is hazy or a clear morning, like in Scott’s painting above.

I was a student of Joe Paquet for several years and learned these techniques and how to observe the scene with them in mind. I also learned that I don’t have the patience or ability to follow that path. Though this did send me back to photography, it was a fantastic experience in learning to see. How a composition is chosen for painting is very different from photography. Where a painter spends time studying the light effects and the forms; a photographer looks for ways to show depth through the composition; because he doesn’t have the ability to change the colors and the line weights. The two fields are very different in execution, but both demand careful observation and the ability to really see. That’s one of the things that encouraged me to take Chris Marquart’s workshop, Learning To See.

So the upshot is I’ve invested lots of time and money in faithfully reproducing these incredible works of art by artists that I have a lot of respect for. I’m driven by the challenge and the opportunity to work with them and their art. I can now take these shots that require absolutely no post processing and use them on the websites that I have built for them and provide them for reprint in magazines and show catalogs. If you think that I am going to explain my techniques and provide a step-by-step guide — forget it. But if you are interested in having me photograph your art, give me a call!

« Duck Portrait | Sarah’s Greenspace »