Art by Kevin Soriano

Over the weekend I had an opportunity to photograph some really good paintings by Kevin Soriano. He is a Sonoma County artist that enjoys working with really large canvas. I must say that it was impressive to see original paintings of that size. Very good use of color. Photographing a painting is fairly straight forward process when it comes to set up. The canvas plain and the camera sensor plain should mirror each other. This shoot was done using natural lighting on a cloudy day which worked out perfectly because there was no harsh lighting reflecting of the canvas. Be sure to shoot on the lowest ISO setting to maximize your digital camera. Another thing to note is the aperture setting should be around 16 to get the maximum depth of field. You would be using a tripod so shutter speeds aren't going to matter. Hint: Use a shutter release cable or the self timer to trip the shutter which will reduce any possibility of camera shake.

In this experience I found that the post processing shouldn't be very extensive. You really want to let the art do the talking. Only small adjustments to maximize the digital image for the web and printing. I used Adobe Lightroom for the first time with this, and I must say that it was a learning process. It's a simplified version of Photoshop without all the nick knacks and do hickeys, but the interface can be confusing if your really used to the set up in photoshop (which I am). However once I got the hang of it I could see why so many photographers use it. There are great shortcuts to accessing your work, organization is fairly straight forward, and although I didn't use it this time around batch processing is going to make life much easier when it come to event photography.






Stay posted for Kevin Soriano's website and information on his future book release. Thanks Kevin for the opportunity to photograph your work and the bottle of wine. It was a great experience.

It was hard to pick just two, but here are my favorites of the shoot.

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