Saturday, May 03, 2008

Visual Limbo

It seems like I wasted about two hours yesterday taking new pictures of a bunch of smaller pieces. Anyone who has taken digital photos of textile work has run into this problem. I hate it that I am beginning to doubt my Canon A95's capabilities - it's going on four years old now and gets used almost daily. The only difference in these two shots is that I turned the flash off for the second shot, with no other adjustments hoping (there's the key to my dilemma) that the morning light would be enough. I prefer natural light because any textures show up wonderfully but colors and values often suffer. So much depends on the weather, the time of day and other things all outside of my control. I guess the truth, as the human eye sees it, is somewhere in between. I'm going to try again later this overcast morning with more ambient light.

4 comments:

Vicki W said...

Do you use a gray card in your photography? I learned about these over a year ago and it has made a huge difference in the color quality on my photographs. Put the card next to the piece when you photograph it. The camera wants something in the photo to be gray and that's why your colors get off. With the gray card it has the gray for reference. You crop the card out of the photo when you edit it. I think it's 18% gray and I've been told that faded blue jeans work in a pinch. Maybe you can find a piece of gray fabric or something and experiment to see if it helps.

arlee said...

Gwen MaGee has a wonderful page of links about photographing textiles on her site
http://creativityjourney.blogspot.com/search/label/Photographing%20Textile%20Art
It IS very frustrating sometimes depending on the light and what you've used in the piece!

Karoda said...

Dirty Pool is a great looking piece!

and I'm definitely "no glass!" on a textile piece...seems to suffocate them.

Denise Aumick said...

Like this very much! The freedom in your work is inspirational.