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.