It only occurred to me today in a conversation with someone else, that I rarely mention, and never I thank in writing, that I have an excellent photographer. This is critical. Every time I talk about a Gallery Print or a Giclee or an embellished Giclee on cavas, I’m talking about a photograph of my painting which is then transferred to digital print. There would be no print sales otherwise. Only one painting has been proffessionally scanned and I’d never do that again (!).
An excellent photographer is a hard thing to find. The first criteria is that they understand the point of the photograph, not only what the image should be in terms of focus, light and colour, but what the overall idea is supposed to be. They get the context and higher purpose. But they are also skilled at seeing the fine detail. My photographer is an absolute gift and he also happens to be my husband. I had no idea, even when we were first married, that this is the skill he would bring to a real working parnership.
When we work on a photoshoot, we use a room with excellent surrounding light, not direct light. We used to use my studio, north facing with a huge window and blinds. We now use our front room with a light mushroom coloured wall, a large south facing window and lights we can position as needed. Pete chooses all the camera settings for things I didn’t even know existed. I then plug the cameral into my Microsoft Surface Studio computer with a screen resolution of 4500 x 3000 and open the image, usually with the painting next to me. Seldom, but possible, is that I’ll open the photograph in Camera Raw and make adjustments. The fun thing is that if the image isn’t quite square becasue we may not have the distance of camera to size of painting which we need, I can straighten it when I move on to Adobe Photoshop.
When I write ‘We’, I truly mean we. My artwork gets out there because of Pete. Quite a team.
