I've started photographing my work on the north-facing porch, and the colour is finally honest
Ten years of photographing finished paintings under whatever light was convenient, and I only got it right this spring.
The problem, as I now understand it, is that I had been lighting the work rather than letting it be lit. Two daylight bulbs on adjustable arms, a grey card, the whole apparatus. The photographs were bright and clear and wrong. Payne's grey kept going slightly blue, and the yellows in a foxglove study flattened into something closer to mustard. I told myself it was a monitor issue and did not look into it further, which is how one avoids learning things.
What changed was a small job for a neighbour, a simple study of a hellebore, that I photographed on the north-facing porch at about eleven in the morning because I was late and could not be bothered to set up the lights. Overcast, no direct sun, pale wall behind. The photograph looked like the painting. Not better than the painting. Like it.
I have since done every piece that way, and I now keep a note of the weather in the file name so I can reproduce it for a reprint. It is slower and it depends entirely on the sky cooperating, which offends the part of me that likes a controlled setup. But there is no arrangement of lamps I have found that does not lie about a green.
The thing I keep turning over is how long I defended the equipment. I had spent real money on it and I think I needed it to have been the right purchase. Somebody in this channel said something similar about a daylight lamp recently and I found myself nodding at the screen before I had quite admitted it to myself.
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The bit about "lighting the work rather than letting it be lit" is the whole thing, and it took me a long time to get there too. I spent years dragging a kit of lamps around to shoot installations, and every photograph came back looking like a furniture showroom. Then someone pointed out that I was documenting the lamps, not the room. North light is honest because you cannot bully it. It will not brighten a corner for you and it will not lie about the darks.
The part I would push on is the grey card. Fine for a flat painting, useless for a room you walk through, because the object being photographed is the shadow and the shadow has no reference patch. I stopped correcting and started just accepting whatever the porch gave me, and the work finally looked like the thing people actually stand in.
Payne's grey going blue is a nice detail. That one will humble you every time.
"you cannot bully it" is a lovely way to put it and true of the making too. I proof my blocks on the kitchen table and the ink looks one way at nine at night and a different animal entirely at eight the next morning, and I've learned to trust the morning.
I'd half agree on the grey card though. For a flat print it's grand, but the thing that catches me out is the paper. Cream paper mid-morning goes warm and I've had buyers tell me the print was yellower at home, and they were right, it was the wall light. No card fixes that. So what do you do for the room, judge it by eye and hope, or is there a trick I'm missing?