After the Rain

I’ve had a few queries about photographing paintings, or how I do it. The difficulty I’ve had from the beginning was the light. Firstly, light is ‘coloured’ depending on the source. Its referred to as Colour Temperature. When I started recording videos and photographing paintings I would adjust the settings on the camera to match the light source. For example, tungsten lighting, or fluorescent. The preset settings on the camera are fine for most cases but not precise enough for what I was doing. Tungsten light varies from bulb to bulb, as does fluorescent, and this was noticeable when the same painting was photographed in different rooms using the appropriate camera preset. The photographs were slightly different. I then used a standard white card to set the White Balance on the camera (most digital cameras allows you to this). This was a vast improvement over using the presets as the light ‘temperature’ is measured and this is used as the setting.

However, I found slight differences between the image in a video and a photographic image taken at the same time with the same settings. Its to do with the way the image was recorded, as a video or still photograph. This was very noticeable using fluorescent light. Fluorescent lights flicker on and off at a rate of about 60 times per second and this is varying from second to second. A video taken at one thirtieth of a second shutter speed, should get 2 fluorescent flashes per frame, but it can be more or less, and this will affect the exposure. Its seen as black bands moving up or down the resultant video. A still photograph, taken with a long exposure of half a second, will get approximately 30 flashes in the half second the shutter is open. But this varies from photo to photo. All this flashing really confuses the automatic exposure in the camera so every setting has to be on manual.

So the solution, I thought, was to use incandescent light, like tungsten standard bulbs. These don’t flicker but the problem was heat. The lights had to be positioned in a particular way to avoid the gloss of the wet paint (more about this in the future). As I painted and recorded in a single session of about 2 hours, the heat from the lights was unbearable.

In the end I purchased 2 fluorescent photographic lights and although the manufacturer’s instructions said to set the White Balance to 4000K, by experiment I found the correct setting for the lights was 4400K. These flicker like standard fluorescent lights but at a much higher rate. So the variations are less noticeable. Now the video of a painting looks the same as the still photograph of the same painting and all paintings photographed under exactly the same conditions have the same ‘relative’ colour balance.

Having worked through this process makes me wonder about the torturous lengths painters go through to have accurate colour matching of their subjects in paintings. The colour of natural light varies from morning to dusk, from sunshine to shade or overcast. Artificial light varies with every light source. We don’t see the difference as the ‘automatic’ adjustment in our brains masks the differences. The painting produced in ‘natural’ light and hung in a gallery under artificial light are completely different in colour and we don’t notice the difference. Furthermore, no two people see in the same way and many people are partially colour blind (especially men) and they aren’t even aware of it. So much for accurate colour matching – all colour is relative.

Here is the video of the above painting. See you soon.