Photographing my collages

by Vijaya
(Mumbai, India)

Mixed Media Art Questions for Milliande

Hello Milliande,

I make paper collages from magazine paper. Thought of making a blog and uploading photos of artwork done and have run into a few trouble spots here.

1) I photograph indoors on a sunny day in a bright room using a 3.2mega pixel Nikon digital camera. The flash creates a glare due to the glossy magazine paper. If I turn off the flash the picture is a little blurred. So now I have stuck a little bit of tissue paper on the flash. But am still not happy with the result though the glare has been largely eliminated.

2) Pictures taken on the camera seem rather dull. The brightness of the colours in the original is not replicated. Why is this?

3) As I also have a HP photo smart scanner, I tried to scan my smaller A4-sized artwork (with best resolution selection), hoping this would portray in true colours. These are better than the photographs however, all the blues appear very dull when I view it on the screen. Bright ultramarine blue appears so dull on screen (see sample picture). The other colours are also a bit dulled down. Is the scanner not good or is it my Samsung PC monitor? I can view all kinds of colours on the PC when I visit other websites so it cant be incapable of displaying all colours? Can it?

Please tell me what I should do diffrent to get really good looking photos like I see on most other sites.


Mixed Media Art Questions answered by Milliande

I personally have not much experience with photographing artwork professionally, I rely on photographing my artwork in daylight outside to capture as much natural light as possible, I use a tripod to hold the digitaal camera still and hope for the best..

I cannot recommend cameras as my knowledge does not expand into that area but I put the question out here so that any of our members of our art community may be able to jump in with their art camera suggestions

I personally use a G10 digital camera by Canon which is a small handheld one that has good macro capabilities for smaller details

...milliande