[Chris Saper]

You will get the greatest consistency and color control in photographing your paintings under controlled Tungsten lighting conditions.

1. Set-up. Setting up indoor shots is neither expensive not difficult. You will need: two light standards, with reflectors (I got mine from B&H photo for less than $150); two Tungsten bulbs(500 watts, usually $7-10), a tripod for your camera; a cable release for your camera so you don't wiggle it by pushing the shutter release manually; and a dark (this means DARK) room.

2. Exact Kelvin degree matches. Tungsten film is calibrated to exactly 3200 degrees Kelvin, and so are Tungsten lightbulbs. Buy Tungsten slide film, or Portra 100T, or Fuji's NPC 160 for prints.

3. The tripod lets you get the lowest speed film possible which translates into the best resolution. The Kodak 64T slide film is very slow (you could never hold the camera steady enough without the tripod).

Use the same principles in angling your canvas so that it is exactly perpendicular to your camera. Place the lights equidistant from the canvas, at about 45 degrees, and each about half the distance as your camera is away from the canvas.

Likewise BRACKET your exposures, beinning with an f-stop of f-8. Use a color bar for reference when printing the image.

Shoot the whole roll. You should keep the Tungsten film in the refrigerator until use, and put the exposed roll back in if you're not going to take it to be processed right away.

My set-up is in my laundry room. I cut some black foamcore board to cover the window (velcro to keep it in place) and set a second piece of black foamcore on top of the washing machine. As there's a cabinet above, I have removed the handles and placed velcro here to to keep the board in a vertical position. You could easily do such a setup in a dark garage too, and you wouldn't need the boards.

There are some other fine tuning aspects you can employ, but these will work great, I took every 35mm slide for my book in the laundry room.

Chris