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Most comprehensive guidebook in
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Completely Unprofessional Notes
on Taking Photos of Outdoor Sculpture
(c) 2005 Dianne Durante
I don't have the time or the inclination to become a professional photographer or a whiz at PhotoShop: I'd rather be writing. Publishers' budgets being what they are, however, I'm taking my own photographs for an upcoming book on outdoor sculpture in Manhattan. Here's what I've learned, by trial and error, about taking digital photos that are to be professionally printed in B&W.
Camera
1. At minimum, use a 2 megapixel camera. 3 MP or more would be even better. More MP means you can print larger pictures without losing quality, or get decent results for offset printing. Offset printing is usually used for printing books, and it has more dots per inch than your home inkjet printer ever dreamed of.
2. Make sure the camera has a good lens. The brand names to look for in moderately-priced cameras are Olympus, Nikon and Canon.
3. The camera should have at least a 3x optical zoom. If your camera has a digital zoom, TURN THE DIGITAL ZOOM OFF. If you use it, you'll think from the viewfinder that you're getting great detail, but when you look at the image on the monitor or at a printed copy, the photo will be full of jagged edges.
4. The camera should have a spot metering mode, which allows you to take photos of a dark object against a light background ("backlit").
5. The camera should have a manual option, so you can set the aperture or shutter speed if you want to.
6. If you expect to have the photos professionally printed (by offset, in a book), you need the ability to take TIFFs as well as JPGs. Because TIFFs take up about 1,000 times as much storage space as JPGs (5 MB vs. 5 KB), you'll also need a lot of storage capacity. Trial and error gets you better photos than an attempt to get one perfect picture. (My camera doesn't take RAW files. If yours does, find out if they'll do as well as or better than TIFFs.)
An extremely useful site for getting specs on digital cameras is www.dpreview.com. Stephen Manes' "Spring Shoots" article, Forbes Magazine 5/23/05, is a useful basic introduction to the current crop of non-professional cameras.
Fundamental principle
A camera does not work like human eyes plus human brain. When you look at a sculpture in a park, you see a figure of a man in a frock coat, with leaves and sky in the background. Your camera sees "green pixel - green pixel - blue pixel - green pixel" and so on. In other words, your brain sorts out and integrates what you see, automatically factors in the third dimension, struggles to identify darker details, focuses on what's viewable and tells your eyes when to squint against dazzling reflections on polished bronze.
A camera merely records patterns of light that enter its lens. It has a sensor for checking the amount of available light, and a program for telling it how to record the bits and pieces you've positioned within the lens. Push a button and it does exactly what it's programmed to do, no more and no less.
When taking photos you need to use your brain to help your camera. Yes, an expert in Adobe PhotoShop can correct a multitude of errors in a photo, but it's a time-consuming process that starts out with a fairly steep learning curve. I prefer to do the best I can when I'm taking the photo, and make only minor adjustments in the software that came with my 4-year-old Olympus Camedia 2040Z.
Advice & suggestions for taking photos
1. Weather: If at all possible, take sculpture photos on an overcast day. Bright sunlight casts strong shadows; you'll lose a lot of detail in those areas of the photo. If you try to bring up the detail by using the Brightness control on your software, the brightest areas of the sculpture will then lose all their detail. If the sculpture's in a tree-shaded area, strong sunlight will create a distracting dappled effect, a random leopard-skin pattern that obscures the artist's details.
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Sunny |
Overcast |
Dappled |
2. Background: Look methodically for distractions. In New York the worst offenders are tree branches and pigeons. Shift your position until such items are less obvious and obnoxious – for example, so the tree branches are to either side of the sculpture's head, rather than growing out of it. Also think about textures. Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden at Port Authority Bus Terminal is in front of a slanted mirrored window. If you snap a photo with Gleason's head against that window, the shininess of the face gets lost in the rippling patters of the window. Once you convert the photo to B&W it's even worse: the texture and color are both similar.
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Tree-branch head |
Same texture on face and behind face |
Face against different texture |
3. Composition: While you're trying to position yourself so the tree branches are out of the way, also try to get a good view of the sculpture's head, in profile or three-quarter view rather than a full-frontal mug shot. If there's an important object with the figure (Ericsson's Monitor, for instance), try to get a shot in which that's also recognizable.
4. Zoom: Use the optical zoom (never use the digital) to fill the lens with the sculpture. You want to be using as many of the available pixels as possible for the sculpture, in case you decide to crop it later. It's better to stand a bit back from the sculpture and zoom in, rather than standing so close to the that you're capturing the underside of the figure's chin instead of its face. Setting the picture up via the camera's LCD monitor (rather than the viewfinder) is the most reliable way to do this (unless you're using an SLR, in which case you're already seeing what's in the lens). Fit the sculpture's head and feet in, with very little to spare.
5. Spot metering: The spot metering mode is often extremely helpful. If this is not turned on, the camera's sensors will take readings from half a dozen difference places in the picture and the camera will try to average its automatic settings out to get a compromise setting that works for everything. If spot metering is turned on, the camera will only take a light reading at the center. Aim the crosshairs at the center of the viewfinder at a big, solid chunk of the statue. At the edges of the image, bright blue sky will fade and trees will be ghostly, but you'll get much clearer detail on the sculpture. The faded background is actually an advantage when you convert photos to B&W. It makes the sculpture stand out more. NOTE: You can also experiment with turning off the camera's AutoFocus and changing the exposure manually. Discussing this is beyond my unprofessional competence. I don't try to figure out whether to make the aperture numbers go up or down, I just turn on the camera's LCD monitor, point it at different parts of the sculpture until I get an exposure that looks OK, press the shutter button halfway down to lock the setting, frame the picture in the monitor, and press the shutter the rest of the way down.
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Automatic settings |
Spot metering |
Spot metering converted to grayscale |
Fiddling with the photos
1. If you're collecting photos for professional printing, download them from the camera to a folder that's labeled "Not to be touched," and then make a copy of the folder for experimenting with. I was told by the book production manager at my publisher not to do anything but rotate the images if necessary, and convert them to grayscale. Anything else decreases the quality of the image. But I need working copies of the photos, and I like to tinker with them; so I tinker with copies.
2. Open a TIFF in your photo editing program. Convert it to 256 grayscale.
3. Use the Image / Brightness control to make the image a couple shades lighter, but not so light it starts to look washed out. What looks very good on a computer monitor doesn't look as good printed. You'll find this out by trial and error. Again, don't mess about with a photo you're sending to be professionally printed, unless you've asked the printer or production manager if it's OK.
4. Crop the image as much as possible, so the viewer sees the sculpture, not the trees and buildings around it. Don't crop a photo that you're sending to be professionally printed unless you've checked first with the printer / production manager.
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