Ideally, when you are photographing artwork you’ll want to get it out from under the glass. But the real world sometimes creeps in, and you might have no choice for various reasons.
Art under glass
You may need to photograph artwork under glass because the work is fragile. This could be due to the age of the materials. Or it might be the fragility of the medium used. Pastels come to mind as the chalky material can be brushed off with the lightest of touches.
Whatever the reason, if you are forced to keep the glass, there is a way to make it happen.
Reflections
One major problem is dealing with reflections. Even if the glass is museum grade — which many pieces are not due to cost factors — glass will yield reflections of what is in front of it.
I’ve found if you place black paper covering the entire area in front of the art the reflections are gone. Cutting a hole in the paper lets the camera lens peek through. You may need to do a little post production cleanup if the glass on your lens appears as a reflection. If you use the lighting setup I recommend in this article, you should not even have to deal with that.
Final post-production
There is one other issue involved with photographing art under glass. Most glass, especially inexpensive glass, has a slight color cast. You’ll need to make color corrections with the artist on hand to make sure the color matches the artwork underneath.
If you have any questions about this process, let me know in the comments. Make sure you check out my previous article on photographing artwork for a clean lighting setup and this follow-up article to ensure a successful shoot.
Yours in Creative Photography, Bob
Have you ever heard about 2 equal lights with polarizing filter, set up the correct way for reproductions, with polarizing filters over the lights, and a third polarizer over the lens? Whit correct technic, you avoid all reflections! Only problem I encountered over lots of work over the years: gold color turns brown, silver turns grey… All other colors work great and alive. In the case of gold and silver, maybe you should use to umbrellas. And yes, I also used the black card behind the lens as you teach! Kind regards.
Absolutely. A very valid technique which was how I used to photograph art. The reason I do it the way outlined above and combined with the previous article is for the color shifts you mentioned and the difficulty in getting an even spread of light with crossing lights pointed at the artwork.