and here's why you should consider hiring a professional photographer

I consider myself a pretty good amateur photographer and I've done a few posts here on this blog about photographing your own quilts.   I have a really nice Canon Rebel camera that I paid a fair amount for and I've invested in some lighting and other equipment so that I can photograph my own quilts.  Usually I work in bright, bold saturated colors which I've never had an issue photographing but recently I decided to create a piece using only black, white and gray.  When it was done I hung it up and photographed it over and over again adjusting the lighting each time trying to get a good shot:

 

(click these photos to enlarge)

and here's the detail shot I took:

These are not bad photographs  but what you don't really see in them is a lot of the surface texture and some of the windows are done in white but they don't quite pop enough.  There's also a bit of a color shift compared to what the quilt really looks like in person and between the full sized and the detail shot.  No matter what I did I just couldn't get the colors to read as true as I wanted and I couldn't get the white of the windows to contast with the gray enough.  So I decided to turn to a professional for help and made an appointment to have Joe Ofria photograph this quilt for me and here for comparison are the photos he took:

(click these photos to enlarge)

These two photographs by Joe Ofria

 

 

His photos are way better than mine and are a much truer representation of the colors in the quilt.  He was able to capture the surface texture and the contrast of the white is much more obvious in his photos.   I plan to submit this quilt for consideration for an exhibition and if it doesn't make the cut I won't have to wonder if it's because of the photo quality.

I highly recommend using Joe to photograph your quilts.  You'll find his website here with all of his contact information. 

lighting makes a difference

In my last post about taking photographs I talked a little bit about lighting, using a tripod and that it's important it is to photograph your quilt standing directly in front of it.  I also mentioned that you don't need a really expensive fancy camera to take a good photograph of your quilt and in this post I'm going to show you an actual example...

But first I want to show you where I photograph and how I light my quilts.  Unfortunately I don't have any room in my studio for a design wall and I don't have any walls in my house that are good for photographing my quilts against.  But I do have a large finished basement with a nice big wall that's perfect for using for photographs so I had my husband cover the wall with some foam board from the hardware store:

I covered the foam board with some canvas fabric to cover the bolts and the seams and then covered that with some white cotton stretched over the surface.

This gives me a nice neutral background to shoot against.   You can see in the next photo that I've got my quilt pinned against the background and I've set up my photo lights to light the surface of the quilt.  I'm using photo lights because there is no natural light at all in my basement.  These lights are very inexpensive (less than $50 for the pair of table top ones but I use the larger stand ones like the ones here) and they make a huge difference in the quality of my photos.  I also have a set with an umbrella diffuser that do a nice job lighting objects with diffused light.

 My camera is on the tripod and I'm ready to shoot...

and the resulting photograph:

Not a bad photo but can you see the shadowing along the left and right edges?    That was easily fixed by adjusting the position of the lights and pulling them further away from the surface of the quilt.  The new photo:

Much better!  no shadows and the picture is nice and clear and the colors bright and vivid.  The right lighting is so important.  Take a look at this next photo.  I turned the photo lights off and took this with just the overhead lights in the room on:

Yikes!   The colors are dull and flat and it's really not a good representation of what the quilt actually looks like in person.


I took all of the photos above with my Canon Rebel t2i camera which is a great camera but it's an expensive investment that I know not everybody can or wants to make.  So the question remains can you take a good jury ready shot of a quilt without an expensive camera?  You certainly can!  Take a look at this next photo:

 I took this with my inexpensive Canon Powershot camera (a great camera for traveling with by the way) which goes to show that with a tripod and good lighting that you don't need an expensive camera to take a good photo of your quilts.

See all my previous posts on the subject of photography here.

let's talk about taking photographs

At some point, regardless of whether or not you want to submit your work to an exhibition or not, you are going to want to take a photo of your work.  It might be to share it in a blog post, on your facebook page or to send a photo of it in an email to a friend.  You should always strive to take the best photo possible because after all, you spent all that time creating the quilt so don't take a photo that doesn't accurately represent what a beautiful piece of art it is.

But let's approach this from the point of view that you want to submit your quilt to a call for art.  You finish your piece and it's time to take a photo so what's the best way to do that?

First and foremost and I can't stress how important this point is: remember that in the case of a juried submission the photographs of your work are what the jurors are using to determine whether or not your quilt is going to be accepted or not.  The juror is not going to look at the photo and say, "well I think this is a good piece of work but the photo is not great so let me go pop over to the artists website to see if there is a better image of it".  In most cases the juror is not even going to know who the artist who made the work is.  So the photos that you submit need to be the best representation of your work.   There's an excellent blog post here by Kathleen Loomis who is one of this years jurors for the Quilt=Art=Quilt exhibit at the Schweinfurth Art Center talking about her experience with viewing the photographs of work submitted for the show.  She shares some excellent advice and tips about what you can do to improve your chances of being chosen for a show that is juried from digital images.

Do you need to go out and buy an expensive camera to take a decent photo?  Not necessarily.  Many of  the compact point and shoot cameras can take terrific photos if you make sure that you are taking photos at the highest setting the camera will allow.  So before you start taking photos consult your camera’s manual to make sure that you have the camera set to take as large and as high a resolution photo as possible.  Some cameras will let you take smaller lower resolution photos to save space on the cameras memory card.  You might find this information in your camera manual under “image size” or “image resolution”.

Here are some of my own tips:

Find a spot where you can hang your quilt against a neutral background.  This means you don't want to take a photo of your quilt on a bright red, yellow, purple, paisley, checkerboard or any other color or patterned background!  This is also not the time to take your quilt outside and hang it on a fence, over a porch railing or ask someone to stand behind it and hold it up while you take a picture of it.  If you don't have a wall with neutral color paint on it then consider covering your design wall with a clean piece of neutral color wrinkle free fabric stretched taut over it and photographing against that.  

Hang your quilt on the wall making sure that there are no pins, clips or other items you're using to hang the quilt showing.  Take the time to use a level to make sure that your quilt is hanging straight.

Light your quilt evenly across the surface.  This means you don't want to take a photo of your quilt with a swarth of sunshine coming through the pained windows across it.  Natural light is best but sometimes that's not an option and you have to use electric lighting.  This is fine but be aware of the color of the bulbs you use.  Some household bulbs can throw a yellow tint and it will effect the colors in the photo you take.

Here's an example of a quilt that I recently finished hanging on my photo wall:

So at first glance it looks pretty good and ready to photograph but look closely.  See the little spots of brown along the right and left top side edges?  That's the hanging rod sticking out.  Not a huge distraction you might be thinking but you wouldn't see that in a professionally shot photo.

The quilt is also not hanging straight.  This is easily fixed by using a level to straighten it.

This next image shows another thing to avoid when taking an photo of your quilt:

I was obviously not standing in front of the quilt when I took this shot.   You should always take your photos standing directly in front of your quilt.  I use a tripod when I photograph my quilts.  It was an inexpensive investment that really makes a difference in the quality of my photographs.  You'll find the one that I use here.

Take several test shots to check that the lighting is right.  Don't expect that your first photo is the best one.  I always have to take several shots in order to get the lights in the right place.  

Here are some terrific online resources for more information about taking photographs of your quilts:

Holly Knott has an incredibly comprehensive series of articles on her website about taking photographs of quilts:   http://www.hollyknott.com/stq/index.htm

The Bernina We All Sew blog has a series of posts by Kerby Smith on how to take great photos of quilts:

part 1: http://weallsew.com/2014/04/10/5-tips-for-taking-great-pictures-of-your-quilt/
part 2:   http://weallsew.com/2014/05/07/10-tips-for-photographing-your-quilts-and-sewing-projects/

There's some helpful information on the Modern Quilt Guild website:
http://themodernquiltguild.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/photographing-your-quilt/

The International Quilt Association has some great tips for quilt photography:
http://www.quilts.org/tips.html 

You'll find my previous posts about digital photography here.

let's talk photography...

Way back when, a long time ago, when I started my artistic journey I had a big clunky digital camera that actually wrote to 3 1/4" floppy discs!  By today's digital camera standards it took terrible photos but at the time 15 years ago it was cutting edge.  I used to to take photos for all my online class materials and to photograph my artwork.  I knew next to nothing about photography back then and when I look back most of my photos are dark, blurry and the colors are definitely off.  I replace that camera eventually with a nice Canon Rebel and started to get much more interested in photography because my camera took much better photos and photo editing software was getting much easier to navigate.  I was also starting to submit my work to shows, exhibits and magazines so I needed to know how to take a great photo.  Fast forward to 2011 and I signed a book contract with Potter Craft to write my first book "The Sketchbook Challenge".   I was given a very short 4 months to write it and on top of that, it was up to me to handle all the photography because Potter Craft didn't supply any photographic support.  There was precious little time to write the book, create the artwork and then try to find, interview and hire a photographer so I decided I would do all the photography for the book myself.   I gave myself a crash course in how to photograph artwork and there were three books that taught me everything I needed to know:

 

This book by Steve Meltzer is a fantastic resource for learning how to photograph artwork.    It appears to be out of print but it's worth tracking down a used copy or checking with your library to get a copy.  

Another excellent resource is Gloria Hansen's book "Digital Essentials"

This book is packed with just about everything you need to know about taking and working with digital images of your quilts.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough if you are taking your own photos of your quilts to submit to juried shows.  Click here to order a copy.

You can't take a good photograph without good lighting:

  Digital Photography Lighting for Dummies is an excellent resource for learning about effective lighting and  lighting equipment.

I cannot stress this enough - using a smart phone or table to take a photo of your quilt to submit it for jurying to a quilt or art show is not appropriate!  I love my Iphone, I carry it everywhere and I take a lot of photos with it BUT I would never use it to create a digital image to submit my work to a show, magazine or a portfolio.   You don't have to spend weeks and months of your life studying photography but you should learn the basics so that when you submit a photo to a show you can be confident that it is a true representation of your work.  Take the time to learn how to use your digital camera and some basic photo editing software.   Start with these books I recommend above and you'll be glad you did!