I did a few photo tests today to see what would be the best lighting situation to shoot photographs of the oil paintings in. These oil paintings are particularly tricky to represent accurately within a digital image; the subtle blues and yellows in the background get lost in the digital image and the result is that it looks much more like a black and white image than I would like them to. The actual figures themselves photograph well because they are so highly contrasted against the background, but the background is definitely going to be the most challenging part.
I’ve always regretted that I never took the opportunity to take a photography class when I was studying at RISD. It’s the one major discipline in visual art that I feel I completely missed out on when I was an undergraduate. I’ve learned very basic photography skills while on the job, but I would really like some day to have formal grounding so that I can truly understand the concepts associated with photography.
Clara Lieu 