Soft Pastel Art Gallery

General Tips

Lighting: Choose a well lit area. Non directional light is ideal, so if indoors, a fluorescent strip light above works well, rather than a spot light, or other small light source. Tungsten bulbs alter colour temperature a lot, so are not ideal. Fluorescent, LED and daylight bulbs are good.

Outdoors is more preferable, but don’t face the artwork towards the sun, or you’ll wash out some of the colour in the end photo. Avoid the middle of the day. Slightly more subdued mid-morning/evening light is better.

Gentle side lighting can help enhance the texture of the artwork.

Viewpoint: You want the camera as square on to the artwork as possible. That means the lens needs to be inline with the center of the artwork, and the center of the artwork needs to be in the center of the viewfinder. Makes sense, right?

Distance: The further away the better.  This reduces distortion by ‘flattening’ the image. Generally speaking, about 6ft away will be fine.  It’s better to be further away, and then crop the background out of the photo, than filling the viewfinder with the artwork. As long as the resulting crop is still about 1000 pixels wide/long, that’s perfect for our gallery.

DSLR and other advanced cameras

Lens choice: A mid-range telephoto lens, upwards of 100mm, is ideal. This allows you to then zoom in from further away, further ‘flattening’ the image, which is ideal.

Settings: Using a lens in its ‘middle’ settings often gives best results. So if it’s a 200mm lens, use around 100mm.  Set aperture to something around f8. No need for any shallow depth of field stuff here!

Mobile Phone Cameras

Today’s mobile phones are more than adequate to take a decent art photo. Their lenses are usually quite wide angle, so you may have to be a little nearer, but still maintain around 4ft distance and crop out the background. If your phone camera has a zoom lens, try it out, standing further away. You can always compare results from all lens options.

Have fun, and good luck!