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Photos | Slides, Developing | Scanning

Photographers and Studios 

Steven Poe Photography
Input:  Photography of 2D & 3D artwork on 35mm and 4x5 film, or direct digital photography. Color transparencies, negatives, or black & white. Scanning onto photo cd or zip media. File manipulation to match originals (color, density, contrast).
Output:  Consultation, coordination, and production of printed promotions.
Postcards, greeting cards, mailers - direct digital, short run, and quantity printing.
Steven provides reproduction quality photography for artists, with a one on one personalized service that will find alignment between your artwork, your market, and the infinite unique combinations of input and output available for self promotions.  
415-385-4624    buyart@stevenpoe.com
studio: 720 Clementina Street, SF, CA  94103

• 10% Discount available to Artist Resource subscribers. PLUS Steven Poe will donate an additional 5% to Artist Resource. Email Artist Resource for discount coupon.

Digital and Photographic Services Do you need art work photographed? Slides or Prints? Do you need digital scans for your exhibit postcard, or your postcard or brochure designed? If it happens with a camera or on a computer, I can do it.
e-mail: Sarah G. Vinci

San Francisco, CA

Judy Reed Photography
Artists only photography services. Flat art and sculpture: 35mm, 2 1/4, 4x5 transparencies, duplicates, b&w prints. See her work in the 1997 ArtSpan catalog.
by appointment only: 415-822-7299
Hunters Point Shipyard

Studio Art
e-mail: info@studio-art.com

If you plan to shoot your own photos or slides, there are four things you should pay attention to:

• Color.  To get the most faithful color reproduction, you should should shoot your work outdoors by reflected light (never in direct sunlight). A hazy or cloudy day is perfect. If you must shoot indoors by ordinary light bulbs, use tungsten-balanced film to compensate for the yellow cast of incandescent lights. Never shoot under fluorescent light. You could use regular film and by quartz halogen lights - the cheapest place to buy these is at Home Depot - get the big yellow emergency road lights with halogen bulbs. Get extra bulbs, because after a certain number of hours they start to turn yellow.
• Sharpness.  If your work  has soft edges or rough textures, it might be hard for you to tell whether it's in focus, so focus on the edge of the piece, or place a focus chart against the surface while you focus.
• Distortion.  To avoid distortion, your camera should be firmly mounted on a tripod, with the center of the lens atthe same height as the center of the image. You can run a piece of string from your lens to the image center to see whether the line of sight is tilted.
• Background.  About backgrounds - a white background in a slide just reveals the glare of the projector. You should use a non-reflective, neutral gray or black background. You can buy large sheets of background paper at a photo supply store (try Adolph Gasser, or Photographer's Supply). You can also use black or gray velvet (try Discount Fabrics) as long as it's not shiny. [--Li]

The New Lab at 651 Bryant near 5th, San Francisco (415-905-8555) will do slides in an hour (24 hours for Kodachrome).

Oscar's Photo Lab at 790 Brannan at 8th (415-621-5800) for slide dupes and publicity photos. Quantity discount for 8x10s.

Professional Color Lab at 96 Jessie St. (415-397-5057, near 1st and Market) One-day B&W prints, slide dupes and internegs. Internegs are for when you need a print and all you have is a slide of an artwork. They make a negative of the slide, and then a print from the negative.

Scanning Slides

Before you scan your art work (ie. paintings, sculpture, photographs) you should photograph the art onto slide film with a 35mm camera. Slide film is best because the colors can't be tampered with by the film developers. Once you have your art on slides, you can take it to a CDROM shop to have the slides scanned onto a PhotoCD where the images are stored in digital files that are readable by computers. Theres a really good place called Alpha CD, (415) 325-4877, in Menlo Park, California which specializes in creating CDROMs and their work is quite good. In San Francisco, contact Color 2000, (415) 861-5151, at 1269 Howard St. They charge around $2 per slide with a 2-day turnaround, slightly more for a 4-hour turnaround. The CD costs about  $9. Triple S Camera in Ukiah will scan your slides to Photo CD for only $1.49 per slide, plus $8.69 for the CD. Turnaround is 2 weeks, since they send them out to Kodak. Triple S Camera, (707) 462-3163, 260 School St., Ukiah, CA 95482

There are also slide scanners that you can purchase which will scan your slide directly to a digital file, which you can save to a disk. For a reasonable fee, you can rent a slide scanner at Adolph Gasser 415-495-3852, 181 2nd St., San Francisco.

For slides or transparencies, do NOT get a transparency adapter for a flatbed scanner, since the resolution is not adequate. Instead, you need a separate scanner for that purpose, or you can send slides to a scanning service (see above).

Scanning Photographs and Flat Art

To scan your art works on a flatbed scanner you should first have photographs taken of them and develop them as prints. You can then take the photographs to a service bureau, like Krishna or Kinko's [see CEA, above] and scan the photos into digital files that are readable by computers. One great place to do this is at the Creative Computer Workshop (415.328.5048), on Hamilton Ave, in Palo Alto, California. They charge hourly rates to use their computers with scanners and are a self service shop. They are very reasonable in price. You need to bring your own disks or removable drives to store the scanned image files.

If you scan a lot of reflective art (art on paper, canvas or photos) you should buy a flatbed scanner. Choose one that offers at least 1200dpi 'optical' (not interpolated) resolution, and 32-bit color. I'm very happy with my Umax 1200S scanner which has come down in price recently to about $250 (from $499 '97). Do not get anything made by Microtek, since my experience of their tech support was awful, and they didn't reply or return stuff. Agfa and Hewlett Packard are also dependable, but cost more.

You can also scan the original art piece if the work is flat and not too large. Just lay the art on the scanner bed, close the cover and scan the work. This is a great way to capture images of small watercolor paintings or other flat art. The quality is great and you can sometimes see the texture of the paper or painted surface. Scan the work at 200 dpi or higher, and make your adjustments to brightness and contrast before reducing the file to 72 dpi for the Net.

Finally, you can have your art work photographed by a digital camera. Then you need to convert the image file into a web-compatible format, like GIF or JPEG.

Caution - if your full-frame images are large and detailed, they can be copied off the Internet with some success, sharpened and printed, without your knowledge. If you are concerned about intellectual property or copyrights you should think carefully about how accessible your work is. There is freeware available that allows you to build an invisible watermark into your online images. [See Art Organizations - Copyright.]

Leslie Leslie Bauer Photography
Do you need your artwork, jewelry or craftwork photographed for your upcoming show, open studios or catalog. I can offer 35mm slides, 4x5 chromes, Color or B&W prints or digital output. I specialize in professional juried images or styled for your catalog. Please take a look at my portfolio at http://www.lesliebauer.com
For an appointment and prices please email:
photo@lesliebauer.com or phone (415) 552-9793