Photographing Artwork For Reproduction

[Garnick]

Hello all,

I'm sure some of you good folks are reproducing original pieces for artists. Over the past few years this has become a rather large part of my business as well, but I do have a question concerning shooting original art. For the most part I am scanning art, anything up to 20x24 and a couple of 20 x30 pieces as well. I'm using an old Epson Expression 1680 and it's doing an excellent job. Of course I do have to scan sections and then reassemble in PS, but that's seldom a problem. Occasionally I am presented with a piece that simply will not scan properly due to the medium and its reflective properties. The only draw back to scanning in this manner is the fact that the scanner captures EVERYTHING. Now you might say, well, that's a good thing, but not always. And I'm sure some of you folks know very well what I mean. When I have an original that presents this sort of problem I have a friend shoot it on camera in his studio. Now of course that would be great if he had a 4x5 camera back and a load of resolution, but that's not the case. 14MP is the best he can do and quite frankly it just isn't enough. However, I've been thinking that perhaps we could devise a setup where he could shoot sections, as I do with the scanner, and capture a higher resolution per section. Then I can stitch them together as usual and have more res and hence more detail. Could also control the lighting better to facilitate the capture of brushstrokes etc as with a Cruse Scanner. I suppose in essence I am trying to construct a poor man's version of a Cruse Scanner, but I'd like to get some feedback from the group if any of you are approaching this task in such a manner. Perhaps some sort of description of your setup etc. Any info would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Gary 

[Ellis Vener]

Basically it sounds like you'll need either an easel that has X & Y movements

Or if the piece is to large for that, equally large scale   X & Y movements for the camera.

In either case it may not be as easy as you wish, especially with regard to getting even lighting.

What might work best is for you to buy your friend a 4x5 camera and shoot film and have that scanned of course that will also require that your pal know how to operate a 4x5 precisely and that may be starting to be an almost lost art.

[SeanBK]

I do recall seeing DSLR mounted on a back of either 4x5 or some large format camera and shooting. If you can move the easel along X-Y axis than the lighting/reflection should be identical. Personally I think it is doable. Start your querries with L.F suppliers.

[elf]

Do a search on orthographic stitching, you'll find quite a bit of info available.

[framah]

If all you have is a 14MP camera, you need to shoot many small sections of the original and merge.. but you know that.

What you need to do is build a movable wall that the art is set up on and that way you move the WALL and not the camera.
The camera and the lights stay in the same place and then each section is shot.
Plan to shoot the highest section first, then lower the tripod for the next layer and so on. You do need to make sure the lighting is equal as possible over the entire piece.
The other way to do all this is to get the 4x5 and a Betterlight system. Larger areas of the art captured at one time and huge, high resolution files.
Go to the Betterlight site and check it out.

http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h216/framah/_98X4005smallcopy.jpg[/img]]

[edwinb]

I think dslr on 4x5 was covered extensively with the previous posts www.luminous-landscape.com topic,45158.0
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