Cheaply Reproduce Paintings with an SLR Many artists are looking for good ways to reproduce their paintings without resorting to (a) repainting it, and (b) paying someone else to reproduce it for you. Repainting would be too time consuming and incredibly difficult to reproduce exactly. Paying someone else to do it can be expensive, especially if all you want is one or two copies for friends. They would have to scan in the painting to the computer or repaint it themselves. The price of using their services is only worth it if you’re producing your painting at a wide scale. Again, that isn’t very cost effective if you are hoping to only need 1 digital or a few printed copies of it.
Cameras Luckily, these aren’t a painter’s only resources when it comes to reprinting. She also has the option of taking a picture of it herself, and then doing as she pleases with it. Cameras have escalated to a high enough quality that taking a picture with the right camera will beautifully capture a realistic version of the painting itself. What constitutes the right camera you ask? Maybe when you think of taking a picture of it, you turn to your smart phone, or your sleek, pocket-sized camera that you take with you everywhere. Although these do a good job of capturing memories and things in the moment, they are not the best cameras for capturing your painting. What’s you will need is an SLR camera. An SLR is that large, chunky camera with telescopic lenses that you see some people with. They are the ones you typically set on tri-pods to take nice pictures. They outstrip both the smart phone and the pocket-sized cameras (typically called point and shoots) in a few very important ways. A smart phone may have a ton of megapixels, but in the world of cameras, megapixels aren’t all that matters. You have to have a big enough sensor to capture light for those megapixels to do much. The sensor is located at the back of the camera. It is the part that is exposed to the light presented before it. It captures light and saves it. The larger the sensor, the more light it lets in. Good photography needs the right amount of light to capture the details. Your painting needs a large sensor to capture its brilliance.
A camera from a smart phone typically has a sensor with the circumference of half a pencil eraser. That’s not enough to capture the detail you’re looking for to reprint it or post it on your website and blog.
SLR An SLR has a significantly bigger sensor that captures the important details with a lot of megapixels to compliment it. Then you ask about the point and shoots (those pocket-sized cameras). Aren’t they good enough? On the sensor side, they are still significantly smaller than the SLR. It can’t let in the maximum amount of light. They also differ in an important way in regards to their sights. The view window you look through looks about 2 or 3 inches higher than the picture you’re taking. In other words, your view window looks at something different than your lens does. It’s your sensor’s view that matters. This difference makes it hard to capture what you want to capture. An SLR uses a system of mirrors to see out of your lens. This makes a difference in the quality of the pictures you take of your paintings. To recap, an SLR takes better quality pictures of your art with a larger sensor, combined with a high number of megapixels and takes a picture of the things you’re looking at. You need both for your artwork. Alphagraphics specializes in printing quality pictures in Ogden. They provide a wide variety of printing services to help you reproduce the paintings that mean something to you at an affordable price.