Speaking of Art Blog

This blog post is for artists who photograph their own artwork:  I've owned my newest Nikon camera for a little over 2 years now, and recently I was dissatisfied with how inaccurate my colors were in photos of my finished artwork.  I knew for sure it wasn't the camera's fault, so I decided to invest in a few new items and educate myself about how to manually adjust the color balance on my camera.  OH MY GOODNESS, with just a small cost but a heaping helping of reading and research, I am now getting colors that are spot on in every artwork photo.  It's absolutely amazing!

Here's what I invested in:  a photographer's gray card (they come in all different sizes), and the book, Nikon _______ (my camera's model number in the blank) for Dummies.  That's it!  Then I read up on adjusting the White Balance on my camera, and I messed around with it for a long time until I was able to take photos that match exactly with my artwork's colors.  Here's the really cool part:  I can now take pics of my artwork in different color lighting, and the colors in my photos will come out spot on every time!  Of course, I will still get the best results in bright lighting, but I no longer have to adjust the colors or their intensity ad nauseum with Photoshop afterwards.

I first take a pic of the gray card in the exact same lighting as my subject, and since the camera is preset to know where that gray color is supposed to land on the color wheel, it shifts everything in the photo to align with that color.  SLICK!  I knew my camera was way smarter than me.  I just needed to learn how to put it on the right settings to let it do its thing.

My first pic here is of the camera set on Auto with no flash.  While the colors of my wooden tulips are OK, the blue blinds in the background are off, too gray and drab looking.  The second pic is of my business card sized gray card that I propped up on top of the tulips so that I could take a pic of it in the exact same lighting as the tulips.  Third pic is with the camera now internally adjusted by the gray card image.  Look at that beautiful blue color in the background - SPOT ON.  I set my camera on A (aperture preferred) in order to be able to put my White Balance on Pre-set.  White Balance Pre-set is the setting my camera has to be on to make the proper adjustments internally.  Last pic is of my gray card laying on top of my new (treasured) book.  BTW, I bought both the gray card and the book on Amazon.  Together they ran me only about $26.  Best investment ever!  If you have a really good DSLR camera but don't know much about all its settings, then google your camera model along with "for dummies" and see if there's a whole book written just for operating your camera.  They are a great series, in my opinion.  They're written in plain understandable English for all of us everyday dummies out there.

And I don't have any idea why adjusting the color balance is called adjusting the white balance in photography lingo, but that's what you want to do, pre-set the white balance.  Once you do that, your colors will be spot on every...single...time.  So cool!