Galleries & Exhibitions, Tips & Techniques

How to Take High-Quality Photos of Your Artwork with Your Smartphone

Whether we are happy with it or not, most people engage with our artwork by seeing digital photographs. We share them with our friends and family and maybe more industry based audiences like galleries, fellow artists or potential customers. We share them on social media, through messaging apps and maybe on our own website.

Photographs also form a part of our creative archive and legacy.  Whilst this might seem rather grand if you make art as a side-line or a hobby you are likely to get to a place in your future where you will want to review and reflect on the artwork that you used to make. 

Think of your children/grandchildren too.  They will want to see what type of artwork that you made even if the originals have long since disappeared.

Therefore, it’s important to get photography of our artwork right to record the quality of the work and represent it in the best light (literally!)

Thankfully, we don’t need a fancy camera and lighting set-up to do this. By following a series of easy steps we can take good quality photographs with our mobile phones.  

I have worked with galleries, curators, fellow artists and virtual gallery creators to develop these steps and advice, so let me show you how!

Lighting

Put your artwork in a place where the light is ‘even’ (no strong streaks of light and no direct shadows falling across it).

Outside is often the best for this, preferably in a North facing position.  You do not want direct, strong sunlight as this will ‘glare’ the image and create a shadow when you hover over it to take a photo.

The ideal position would be outside on an overcast day, although a shaded area on a sunny day would be OK too.  There is a surprising amount of luminosity outside even on a cloudy day (much more than inside with all the lights on).  In addition, the artificial lights that we use in our homes usually cast a temperature filter which changes the colour of our artwork. 

Avoid direct sun and shadows like this image.

Placement

If your artwork is on paper, consider mounting it on a board with masking tape doubled over and propping it up against a wall so there are no intrusions.

You want a clear/blank border all around the edge for cropping purposes.

Scene Selection

You want your camera to be ‘square-on’ to your artwork.

The angle of the camera should be the same as the artwork to avoid stretched edges.

In the images below, I show what happens when the angle of my phone is not in-line with the angle of my artwork. One image has skewed edges, which we need to avoid.

Below we see an artwork with skewed edges and the same artwork with correctly lined-up edges.

Editing

Most smart phones have editing software built in.

When you open your photo in the gallery app, click the edit button and follow these steps.

Note: Your ‘edit’ button will appear as a different symbol depending on what type of phone you have. I have a Samsung and it is a pencil symbol at the bottom. If you have an iPhone it will say the word ‘edit’ in the top right hand corner of your image.

Editing steps:

  1. Crop your photo to remove the mount/border.
    1. There will usually be little ‘crop lines’ at the edges and corners of your image. Use your finger to drag these to the correct position. Take the crop lines as close to the edge of your artwork as possible but don’t include any mount. It is better to remove a slight edge of artwork than to leave a sliver of mount in. 
    2. This is where you will learn if your photo was taken skewed – if the crop lines don’t match up and you have to crop a lot of artwork off, you might be better taking a new photo instead.
  2. Fix the colour balance.
    1. Often white backgrounds get changes to a blue shade (cold) or yellow shade (warm). You can use the ‘warmth’, ‘temperature’ or ‘colour balance’ field to adjust this to bring it back to white as much as possible.
    2. Exposure is another useful tool, usually photos are underexposed so you can ‘dial it up’ to get a more authentic appearance.
    3. Experiment with the tools to see what you can achieve. 
Screenshot of my Samsung gallery editing features.
The final edited image

Sharing

Save your artwork as a JPEG (your phone should do this automatically) at the highest resolution possible (again, your phone should have this as standard).

Avoid saving images through Facebook or WhatsApp as they compress the images a lot and lose a lot of quality.  Use free photo sharing apps and websites instead like Google Photos or WeTransfer.

Watch the video link below for a demonstration of how to do this.

Difficult Subjects

Reflective elements like gold leaf are difficult.  You want some light reflection to enhance the metallic effect, so a bit of direct light here might be useful.

Low-relief or sculptural works offer another challenge. We want to photograph it at a slight angle to show the depth and again, a bit of angled direct light might be good to show shadows cast by the sculptural elements.

You can experiment and even invest in a bit of lighting equipment, however with a very tricky subject you might be best investing in a professional photographer, like I did with the image below for an exhibition poster.

I made a collection of small paper cut-outs using metallic gold paper. It was sculptural and gold! I wanted direct light to show the sheen, but a soft general light to avoid harsh shadows but some shadows to show the depth…in the end I used a photographer friend who took the image below. 

We can use the strategies above to improve our photography but sometimes we can bow out and get professional advice.

Storage

I used to store my photos on my phone but quickly ran out of storage. I’m sure you are probably in a similar situation!

I now use Google Photos to back-up my photos to.  After they are backed-up I can then delete them from my phone and I can access them anytime that I have access to the internet.

I quickly ran out of storage on Google photos too, so I now pay £2.99 a month, and I get 100GB of storage for photos and videos which is more than enough!

I can also create folders of artworks and share them with people, which they can then access without having to download the photos to their phone.  There are lots of benefits.  Watch the video below, where I explain in more detail towards the end.

There are other photo storage apps that you can use of course, and mine has taken a lot of stress out of documenting and managing my artwork.


Virtual Exhibition

Good photography of artwork allows you to share your work in any format. Have you ever visited a virtual art exhibition?

I have been working with the students of my online art school and we have created a virtual exhibition of artwork which showcases wonderful artwork photographed well! 

If you would like to view good photography of artwork in action please follow the link below:

https://artschool.myflodesk.com/virtualexhibition

Written by

Tracey Eastham

2   Posts

Tracey Eastham is an artist and art tutor who has worked in Art Schools for over 10 years teaching a variety of subjects. She runs her own art classes from her own home studio near Preston called 'The Vault Art Studio' and has recently launched an online subscription based art school called 'Art School by Suubscription'. Here you can access the same classes that are taught in British Art Schools in order to transform your artwork, but in your own time and space and for a fraction of the price.
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One thought on “How to Take High-Quality Photos of Your Artwork with Your Smartphone

  1. Hi Tracy, I read with interest this post on taking photos of art with a smartphone. You brought up good points. I’d just like to add that sometimes a regular camera with a 35mm lens may be better because there is no picture distortion as there is in a smartphone camera. The camera phones typically use wide angle lenses and may not be the best for photographing artwork.

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