Do I need a macro lens

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scoody

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shane
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Hi all,
I am hoping that someone here can help me with a specific issue I have!!!
My wife is an artist and paints on canvases usually about 100cm x 100cm. She used thick oil and acrylic paint and the paintings are very textured.

I use a Nikon D3000 with a 18-55mm standard lens to take picture for sending to clients and agents etc.
At the moment I am struggling to get a true colour likeness of the painting as there are very colourful and some colour seem to get lost. I am also finding it hard to capture the depth and texture of the painting. My poor photography is reflecting bad on my wife’s brilliant work.

I was wondering if I get a macro lens this would help with the colour and detail I am trying to achieve.

Any help\suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!
Shane Horkan
P.S. you can see some of my poor photography and my wife great work at www.victoriahorkan.com
 
I don't think a macro lens would particularly help, it's more likely that you just need to hone your lighting techniques a little more.

Colour will need good white balance and good, strong, lighting. Texture will probably need some additional (probably subdued) side lighting to bring it out in a photograph.

Post processing will also be key to bringing out contrast and vibrance without going OTT and making the paintings look like bad HDR :)

Can't tell for sure, but looking at the pics it looks like you might just be relying on natural lighting? I don't think that'll work particularly well for that kind of shot - you want total control over the angle, strength and diffusion of the lights. Also natural lightning won't give you consistency that you can develop through experimentation.

So if you don't have a couple of lighting stands, brollies, remote triggers and some form of flash guns/strobes, I'd start there.
 
You need a good lighting setup first and foremost. That's 2x flashguns, two stands with shoot through brollies or softboxes, triggers. You may also want something like a nice sharp prime if details are important - 85/1.8 is great for those. A macro is only needed if the works are tiny.
 
Lighting is key here as said and flash is your friend. Dual flash is best but a single flash + reflector would do it.

As for lenses, a 100mm macro lens for example would work nicely but not because it's a macro lens (allowing high magnification) but because:
- The longer focal length gives you a better perspective
- They generally have low distortion and field curvature
- Macro lenses are generally very very sharp, they don't make the compromises needed for large apertures.

That said, to photograph 100x100cm works with a 100mm lens on a Nikon cropper you need to be something like 7 meters away if my math is right. May not be easy :)

I would probably get a Nikkor 60/2.8 macro lens for that work. Or an old manual 55/2.8 or 60/2.8 as you can use live view focusing. But if the budget is tight, spend it on light and use the kit lens at the long end on a tripod with f/8 or smaller.
 
Last edited:
scoody said:
Hi all,
I am hoping that someone here can help me with a specific issue I have!!!
My wife is an artist and paints on canvases usually about 100cm x 100cm. She used thick oil and acrylic paint and the paintings are very textured.

I use a Nikon D3000 with a 18-55mm standard lens to take picture for sending to clients and agents etc.
At the moment I am struggling to get a true colour likeness of the painting as there are very colourful and some colour seem to get lost. I am also finding it hard to capture the depth and texture of the painting. My poor photography is reflecting bad on my wife’s brilliant work.

I was wondering if I get a macro lens this would help with the colour and detail I am trying to achieve.

Any help\suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!
Shane Horkan
P.S. you can see some of my poor photography and my wife great work at www.victoriahorkan.com
Click to expand...

A macro lens might help, but that's perhaps not your main problem.

The main purpose of macros is to focus very close, but they also have the virtues of high image quality and particularly sharp edges and corners, a flat field (better for photographing flat subjects), and low distortion so that the straight sides of the painting are rendered straight (easily corrected in post processing though).

But the main difficultly is probably the texture of the painted surface, which is visible as the play of specula highlights and tiny shadows. When you look at the live work, they move around as you move left/right and back/forth. If you attempt to capture that in a photograph, you will probably end up with an image that a) doesn't do the work justice, and b) shows just one fixed view, under one kind of lighting, that isn't a very true representation and could easily be a bit of a mess.

I've photographed a few oil paintings for books and to cut a long story short, I ended up killing all reflections completely by putting polarising sheets over the lights and another polarising filter over the lens (at right angles to the polarised plane). Zero reflections, flat representation, but accurate in so far as a 2D photograph of what is effectively a 3D artwork can be.

It's common practise for this kind of thing. Easily done.
 
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