An Appointment with a Professional Photographer

 "Sienna Square"

 24 x 36

"San Francisco"

30 x 40

I've been concentrating on putting the final touches on several paintings in preparation for my first appointment with a professional photographer.  (Funny how a commitment can do wonders to build a fire under you.)  Yesterday, my sister and I packed close to thirty of my works on canvas into our two cars and headed over to the photographer's warehouse-like studio.  

Of course, this very experienced photographer has his system down to a science, but still, the whole process took about three and a half hours with lots of moving around the space as my sister and I grouped paintings by size and orientation, and he set up the background and lighting, hammered nails into the wall, and moved his tripod back and forth.   After each grouping of similarly-sized paintings was photographed, the photographer and I would move back to his computer and work with adjusting the hue, saturation and lightness in Photoshop, while my sister,-- thank you very much -- packed paintings back into the cars.  I came away with both tiff and jpeg images of each painting; some that were uncropped (i.e., showing the background) for gallery owners, and some that were cropped to show the image, only.  The photographer also created a folder of files formatted to 4"x 6", ready to be printed as postcards. One the best parts of the whole deal??  Images of all of my paintings are now easy to find in two folders on my computer, which is such an improvement over my existing hodgepodge filing system!  Such a time saver for me!

Anyway, the above paintings are not recent, but I've never been able to capture good photographs of them. It's so nice to have these!

Portland is heavy with cloud cover and rain, and lush with foliage and flower.  A nap would be perfect!

Happy weekend!