Photographing Your Art for the Website or Social Media 

Music City Soul, 48 x 60, Oil on Gallery Wrapped Canvas by Peach McComb

If sending info for your gallery page on the Nashville Artist Guild website, please include an updated biography, a head shot (if you like), and current contact info. If you prefer, you may just send your personal professional website link and we will put that on your gallery page instead.

Please send 3 to 5 art images, a biography, and/or artist statement, head shot (photograph of your face/or of you painting, and your website address if you have a site. You may send the info to [email protected], or [email protected]. This is the info that goes on your personal gallery page for each painting. We must have it in order to load the work on your page.

1. Medium/media

2. Substrate (what did you use to paint/draw/etc. on)

3. Vertical Size

4. Horizontal Size

5. Depth (Gallery Wrapped Canvas)

6. Year created if you want to include that

7. Retail Price

8. Price Framed

9. Type - Is it an original, a print?

10. Availability - For Sale/NFS (Not for Sale)

If you do not want a gallery page and DO want the Membership Directory to point to your existing website, please let us know that. When you send images for publication on your gallery page, please follow the instructions on the following pages. The image title should be in the same format as the title under the image above.

Each image should be between 500KB (Kilobytes) to 1MB (Megabyte) (1MB) in size, 300 pixels, cropped properly, and in focus. If you need more information on size and pixels and such, please check out the websites below. They are great! On each image, please include your name, the painting size and title, price, or NFS, (Not for Sale)  substrate, and gallery information.

Check this link: https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/p/pixel.htm

MB is megabytes and that means how large the file itself is. For example 1MG (megabyte) would be 1,000KB (kilobytes).

I belong to a few art groups and organizations made up of all manner of artists. Their technological capabilities vary and I am often asked how to photograph artwork and how to get it online in the proper size and format. I have taken a couple of classes on how to photograph artwork effectively and am sharing that information here along with some tips on how to get the images online.

Informative Websites

artworkarchive.com is a very informative website with lots of info on how to photograph your art and about art business: https://www.artworkarchive.com/blog/4-steps-to-photographing-your-art-like-a-professional

Tips and Tricks

If shooting indoors, get next to a door or window. Use a see-through white shade for diffused light. You may also use a sheet. Anything that will diffuse the light coming in the window to eliminate glare, specially if the painting has already been varnished. Speaking of that, you may want to photograph your work (oil/acrylic) while it’s still wet. Photograph a watercolor after it is dry and before framing.

You can photograph your artwork outside, too, out of direct sunlight. In sunlight the colors photograph much differently than they do in a cooler light.

1. Use a blank white wall for a background if possible. This cuts down on post production time by helping balance the color. If you do not have a blank white wall, put matte board, or white foam core on an easel and put the art in front of it.

2. If the art is on the floor, get directly over the art, square it up in the view finder and snap the photo. If it is standing up, or on an easel, again square it up in the view finder and snap it.

3. Use your phone if you do not have a camera and tripod. The new ones have great cameras! Don't use flash. Turn off digital zoom and auto-focus, and don't use a wide angle lens.

4. Photograph art BEFORE framing and varnishing. If the framed piece is under glass, you will need to pull it out as it’s hard to photograph through glass without glare! If you use a gloss varnish, photograph your work before adding the varnish.

5. Take several photos and then take a few more. You can compare them later.

The camera lens needs to be parallel and centered to the painting. This is probably the most important and trickiest part.

6. Square your phone, or camera, up to the art, by making sure the art looks straight up and down and even on the bottom through the lens.

7. Once you have taken the photo, adjust it on the phone or your ipad, tablet, or computer using your photo editing software.

There are several, easy to use, applications out there. The WIX Photography blog has information about this editing software that you can use to adjust your artwork Go to this link for more information. You can send your photo to FaceBook, Instagram, to your email, and your website, right from your phone once you have cropped the photo and gotten it the way you want. You can also put/download your photo on to your computer. Check out the file name, the size, and kind indicated in each column. 

Those sizes may be too big to send for a website, so please compress the files to 1 to 2 MBs if you know how to do that. If not, check out your photo editing software to adjust the image size to a smaller one.

The other issue is when you send photos that are SO small 75KB(kilobytes), for example, that they are blurry when loaded to a website, or online to FaceBook, etc. Online sites try and fit the size of the photo to their format and if they are very small, the image looks blurred or ‘pixelated’.

If you want to put a photo on FaceBook, or Instagram, right from your phone, you must first open the application on your phone and sign in. Next, select the photo, click the upload icon, and it should show options below the photo such as FaceBook, Messenger, etc. Pick the one you opened and you are on your way. You may also share your photo to Instagram from FaceBook, and vice versa.

I hope you find this helpful. If you have questions, please let me know. I would love to hear from you! [email protected] or [email protected]