Glasgow Figurative Artist's Work

[slovakhorse]

Finished webmaster course & am currently working on my own website.I have photographers lamps now to take more professional quality images.Happy Imbolc from Mr Slovakhorse.
Basicly I just think I have to memorise the entire human anatomy to do figurative painting in the way I personally want.

[Malcolm@Westby]

I've wondered about getting my own lights too! I'll have to save up. Good to hear from you again.

[bernard w]

One advantage to getting some lights for photographing your artwork is they may double up as lights to use in the life room. It does depend on they type you buy of course. Many have two bulbs in them, one is the flash bulb and the second a more conventional bulb known as the modelling light. The latter enables you to visually gauge the effect that the flash will have when it fires. (ie how the lights and shadows will look).
The flash itself is fired either by a cable plugged into your camera, or using a slave unit. The slave detects your own camera's flash firing and triggers the other flash light(s). I suspect that unless you own a (digital) SLR camera you will have no means of connecting a cable directly to your camera to fire external flash so will have to use the slave approach. The disadvantage though is that you are still using the on camera flash and may suffer reflection from this if the artwork is at all glossy.
For best results you also need to use a meter to measure the brightness of the flash (more expense).
Of course simply using a few angle-poise lamps could be a good alternative and possibly easier. It might take a bit of messing though to get the light even. Conventional bulbs tend to cast a reddish light and the new energy efficient bulbs probably a different colour cast. Of course you can correct the colour using software.
Daylight is often the best but again does present challenges. As we discussed elsewhere, getting the exposure right can be tricky particularly if snapping watercolours or pencil drawings on white paper.

A tripod for your camera may well be a good (alternative) invsetment so that your camera is steady

Having said all this, most of the pics we see on LifeArt are fit for purpose. They may not always be faithful repro's of the colour but we can usually see the image pretty well. One way to make your photos look more professional on a web site is to crop them so that you don't show anything other than the painting itself.

[Malcolm@Westby]

I was thinking more of lights to use in the studio for still lifes, models etc. rather than photography. I currently have a small random collection of "angle poise" type lamps.