Shooting Art and the Canon xti
I have spent years and probably fifty grand working on my portfolio. In the end it’s very nice to have 4x5 transparencies, which stick around in the brain better than 35 mm slides. I thought the day would never come, but now one can often compete with a jpeg cd, which is just SO much cheaper, not to mention easier on the eyes of some slanted juror.
I’ve never been much of a competition guy with regard to Art Calendar juried competitions, grants, Percentage-For-Art programs, what have you, but I am proud of my documenting, which is in and of itself an achievement. It’s one thing to paint 825 paintings, another thing to shoot and archive every damn painting. I average 50 paintings and maybe 10 sculptures a year, and who shoots all this stuff? Since I’ve never had quite the setup to deal with my own shooting I would shoot my own stuff every so often and send out the important paid gigs. I’ve had a hodgepodge system forever as shooting art is a headache and massive money commitment. This would be the premise for current post, with silver lining happy ending.
I bought a home and last year bought a work studio to accomodate my inventory and creative freakout. Then I renovated these spaces and have lately been tweaking my art making and documenting system. I have been circling photography for a long time now, and in particular digital photography, but the technology has been cost prohibitive in terms of shooting my work to the point where I could get enough data in a shot to blow an image up large myself. So I’ve got a small fabric of scanner people, color correction people, slide people, to get this all done for me. Every time I want to get a giclee quality print out of one of my paintings, which would mean a large print that I hand sign and sell to collectors, I spend an average of three hours and 300 dollars per image for the first print(subsequent prints are way cheaper, but the initial outlay is no fun). Multiply this times 10 or 50, if you make 50 paintings a year like me. Suddenly your head bumps into the same pole mine does. Why can’t I do all that myself?
I bought the canon 10d three or so years ago and it brought my game up to another level. Among other things I do the occasional traditional portrait, and this requires shooting subjects for reference material. There is no shutter delay in the d10, and the whole idea of shooting, getting home, plugging in the camera to the computer was really revolutionary for everyone at the turn of the century! This is now old hat and many first world citizens have their digital cameras, so old news.
The Canon 10d is a wonderful camera, but it cannot give me the detail I need for large prints, large meaning 24 inches tall or wide. These days my goals here are modest, but still on the cusp to an extent. I’ve been looking at the canon 5d, a 3,000 camera that gets 12.8 megapixels, relative to a proper 35 mm shot. This is a historic moment, where a consumer product starts to approach professional quality. But still cost prohibitive. I ordered one at the sham store camera city in Brooklyn, which I would never in my life recommend as they advertise one thing and then call you to upsell you or warn you that what you thought you bought is only a plastic european model you won’t get for 5 weeks. What sort of an idiot do I look like? So I cancelled that order half a week after thinking I’d bought the 5d, dejected yet undeterred.
I’m a nut when it comes to reading about products before purchasing, which is my main gripe about Camera City… their unprofessional approach made me go back into the forums, where I read another 1000 pages about cameras. This story is too long. In the end I bought a Canon xti, in Europe called a d400, or Rebel 2. I’ve got 3 lenses for my Canon, so I just bought the body at 800 all in. I brought the thing home and shot a painting with my new lighting system, a Gerry rig I’ve been playing with that cost 100 bucks (not a grand). I popped the camera’s memory card in the card reader and my JAW dropped. I cannot, cannot believe the information my Canon xti records. I pulled up the scan that I spent 300 on. Although that scan clearly has more detail when you blow a portion of the image up to fill the screen, I’m not making billboards so who cares?
So this Canon cost me 2300 less than the 5d and blows my mind. I recently bought a couple hugely recommended all in one flat screen imacs, a 20” for downstairs (to color correct work next to my shooting setup) and the gorgeous 24” upstairs, my primary computer. I wanted consistent screens so I dumped my g4 with pretty 20” NEC monitor (hard parting with), and I think I’ve got the right idea on this front. The next move for me is an Epson 7800 with rip software. This will bring in house all the work I am used to sending out. I get the printer and start framing my own prints. For a little more time I get to shoot my work the way I see it, I catalogue it and can print it at any future date if this is my goal.
I live in a time where the artist is empowered to run his or her entire career. Most artists don’t care about all this stuff, but that would be to their detriment. The above post deals with an issue I’ve been dealing with for ten years, and suddenly in marches an 800 camera to solve a lot of these problems. It’s not all that simple, but it’s almost that simple. I will post a shot of my lighting with bulb information when I get around to it. Meanwhile the above shot of Ben was a lot crisper until I had to make the image 72 dpi and compress it to get it on the site. But it still reads very nicely after having tossed out 80% of the information - my illustration that the Canon xti (with a 50mm macro Canon lense) is a great solution for shooting one’s art work in a professional way. The side note is that one must be a fluent computer person with Photoshop and all that stuff. One must first start with the computer. I find it remarkable that many of my fellow artists rarely even use one… what are they thinking in 2006?
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