Lately, I’ve taken to posting art progress photos taken with my camera phone for the convenience. The picture quality is inferior enough that the final photograph, the one that shows the finished work in high detail, doesn’t get ignored because of image fatigue on the part of viewers who followed the painting progress.

My daughter loved one of those progress shots and wanted a print.

The camera phone took a decidedly awful picture. So to accomodate her request, I set the art up in my photo studio and stepped up to a canon point and shoot on a tripod.

That was an eye opener. All those prior frustrations came back to mind. For years I’d tried to document the art using Canon digital elph cameras.

Then I picked up a digital Single Lens Reflex camera. Things got better quickly. Now, on my third DSLR I can reasonably expect to nail a sharply focused high resolution minimally distorted image. There are still hoops to jump through, but it works.

I thought I’d just gotten better at photography, but today’s attempt using a point and shoot camera illustrated otherwise. The DSLR works differently. It’s better, less sensitive to surface glare.

My recommendation to anyone who must photograph flat art is to have adequate and even light, a tripod with a ball head mount, and a digital SLR. Distortion is tamed with a 50-60 mm lens, but the point of this blog is that the larger camera handles light better.

For the record, I’m using Nikon. The equipment makes all the difference.