photographing paintings

[Ellis Vener]

I completely agree wit Jorge about the lighting needs. You need to polarize the lights and then cross polarize the camera lens (this means having the poalrizing films on the lights at one angle and the camera poalrizer at 90 degrees to that angle. You have to make sure the lightign is even from top to botom center to edges.

West Coast Imaging can do a high rez (I think up to 100mb) scan for I think about $50.00
if you are goign to start with a digita lcamera , you can get very good results wih the Kodak pro SLR/n or SLR/c. these are high end DSLR thatKodak recently announced that they were discontinuing. I have no idea what they are being closed out for but you'll getthe quality you need. otherthan that the minimum you are looking at is a Nikon D2x or Canon EOS 1Ds mk.2 . The Nikon is just under $5K and the Canon is $8K. But what you'd be best off with is a BetterLight scanning back for a 4x5.

also add in the learning curves for everything from usign the camera and Photoshop Cs2 to color management, scanning and printing.

Come to think of it maybe having someone who already knows wha tthey are doing will be the most cost effective way to do it!

[paulr]

"The lighting issue goes away "if" you have an area outdoors to shoot."

This is how I've done it when my cheapskate artist friends bribed me into doing their work. As a fellow cheapskate artist, I don't own any lights or even filters.

Skylight does a wonderful job of solving evenness and glare problems, but it doesn't solve color problems. You can get things pretty close, but be aware that the color temperature of daylight changes dramatically over the course of the day. How you deal with it depends on how much color accuracy you decide you need.