Tips on How To Photograph your art; paintings and sculptures
Whether the work you perform when taking pictures of your art is amateurish or not means nothing if the result is sufficient.
What is "sufficient" differs depending on what you should use your photos for. When photographing art it is always important that the colours are as similar to the original as possible and that the images are sharp.
When publishing pictures on the net it is very hard to make the images look good on all monitors which will be used to view them. Not all use millions of colours - true colour - and people turn the brightness of their screens up and down to suit their eyes. To solve this in a simple way there is one thing you can check to be sure that your images will look OK on most screens: Check that the darkest details of the painting are visible and check that the brightest parts are not faded out into whiteness.
When publishing your art on the Internet you should not give away pictures with too high resolution. Never publish a picture of your painting which is larger than 600 X 600 pixels - you do not want to give away printable copyrighted material for free do you?
What happened to me a few years ago was that I discovered postcards of one of my paintings, printed from my homepage.
One other common copyright infringement is that if you create art which becomes popular some people will not hesitate to take images from your site and order prints or painted copies from some not so caring oil painting reproduction-site.
Java Scripts and programs designed to prevent visitors from using the right-click menu stop only those with limited knowledge of computers and is usually just a nuisance for people right-clicking with legitimate reasons on your pages.
It's better to make small copyright-marked images which will act as advertisements for you if they are taken from your site.
A 400 X 400 pixels image of a painting gives in most cases the viewers of your art a fair enough understanding of the piece in question. If the artwork is very detailed you should make close-ups of important details available. You should mark your Internet-images with discreet but easily spotted copyright information - not all over your picture though, that will create the same atmosphere as if you would put iron bars over the painting in a gallery.
