Photographing Art Work & An Artist Portrait Too..

A couple of months ago now my artist friend Adrian McDonald commissioned me to photograph recent art works of his, both for his own archive and for an article on Adrian's work, out now in issue 35 of Australian Art Review magazine. I first saw Adrian's work at SNO in late 2009 and made one of my 'artists openings' portraits at that show. And of course being an artist who works with complex line, pattern and tonal ranges; the job of photographing Adrian's artworks and maintaining the fidelity of the art in reproduction is a complex task as well. The trickiest of all were the black detail on black and, the black on black with white; I need to create a digital file with enough information to show the work as you would view it in a gallery situation, the way the eye sees the art. We decided to shoot in the Balmain studio and used the powerful STROBE lighting, and the very classy STROBE light stands to support the art as you can see in the first portrait of Adrian below. Its nice to be able to make a portrait photograph, my own little piece of creativity alongside Adrian's creative output - that photographing well, was for me a fairly technical day with the light and the camera. I'm certainly looking forward to doing more of this work more often as it's great to be able to bring my love of art, artists and photography together for the day.

http://adrianmcdonald.com/
http://artreview.com.au/