Technologically challenged....what to get

[phuong]

how much quality does she require? how much is her budget?

taking pictures of paintings is tricky. there is problems of lens distortions and perspectives. and then there is problems of lightings, white balances. and then there is a big problem of color management.

i think the best combo wouldd be a D-SLR camera with a tilt/shift lens. these lenses don't suffer from perspective distortions if you know what i mean. but they are about $900-$1,000 a lens, no matter if they are from Nikon or CAnon or any other lens makers. they're also manual focus.
this combo is actually very good if it is true that your sister is not handy with things that have many buttons. you just set the whole thing up for her: the lightings and the camera settings, then all she'll have to do is: focus, and press the shutter button. by the way, NEVER use the cameras' popup flash.

if the budget doesn't allow that setup, then try to get the best lightings you can, and use any good PnS cameara. seriously, something like, a Sony V3 will do a very great job. just set it to P mode, turn off the flash option, and put it on a tripod. all she have to do is making sure the camera's lens is leveled with the painting she's taking, to reduce as much distortions as possible. that is, position it so that, the center of the lens looks directly at the center of the painting, perpendicularly.

P/S: i assume you'll set the camera's settings right for better color reproduction. like setting white balance and/or color space.

 

[killmoms]

Not a pro photographer myself (not even a photographer really), but I was thinking if you do go the PnS router and have to deal with distortions, there is a lens distort plugin in Photoshop that can help eliminate distortion if it's particularly egregious. Maybe setting up a grid of some kind and shooting it to see what the lens' natural distortion is and then correcting for it in Photoshop would be good?

Just a thought. Pros, feel free to shoot me down if that plugin actually blows chunks.

 

[freebooter]

There has been a lot of off topic chatter here...

I've used a lot of diffent p&s cameras lately so I'll give you my take.

Canon: good choice. Easy, great color, comes with good software, consistent exposure, solidly built. For your sister's uses, I wouldn't get her any of the cameras in the SD line though. The corners of the images are often blurry since the optics are so cramped. (I have one and have researched the rest) I'd seriously recommend the A630 or A640. I have the A640 and I can say that the lens is sharp as can be, the exposure is excellent, the controls very easy to use and, yes, you can just leave it on Auto and still get great results. You can easily adjust practically anything on it, including the color saturation--important for an artist. The "neutral" setting would be good for her I think. The A630 is essentially the same camera as the A640 but with fewer megapixels. It's a great value, price/feature-wise. If money is a factor, the A5xx cameras are almost as good and very inexpensive.

I have a Fuji F30, too. But for her, no. It has a great lens and sensor, but you need to use exposure compensation a lot to avoid over or under exposure. The results are less consistent compared to the Canon.

For software. It's hard to go wrong with Adobe Elements. Easy, lots of support, and well-priced.

To avoid distortion etc., just put the camera on a half-decent tripod set up far enough away so that the lens is slightly zoomed. (like the equiv. of 50 mm on a film cam.). Use the 2 sec. self-timer to avoid shake.

 

[ChrisA]

^^Exactly.

Any point and shoot will do the job if a 3.1 MP Kodak is only just becoming a limitation for her work.



ChrisA meant that if you spent $1500 on CAMERA EQUIPMENT, and your sister created 150 paintings per year, it would only work out to be $10 per photo per year. The camera and equipment would last her longer than 2 years, so it's really not costing much at all.

I think you should learn to read.

Thanks. That was exactly my point. As soon as you start selling paintings you have a bussines and need to use "bussines logic" and wory about return on investment, cost of funds and all that. If the camera is for a hobby then you ask yorself "how much disposable money do I have" A different decsion process


The other thing is to look at some technical requiremnets Just how good do these images need to be. Are they going to be printed two inches square using 150 line per inch halftome process? Will they be 400 pixel squalr web images or is this going into an "fine art" reproduction print?

I bought a medium format camera from a studio that was shooting small parts for use in lawn mower service manuals. They finaly figured out the images where beibng prined using a cheap process and medium format was a waste. They replaced a Mamiya RB67 system with a small point and shoot and even that was overkill for a 1.5 inch square black and white photo of a spark plug.