I'm going to be visiting a friend's house today, my friend has a very large collection of Orthodox iconography, and I'm going to be taking photos of as much of his collection as he'll let me. I'll be dumping the photos afterwards. Anyone have any advice for taking pictures of icons? I'm no photographer, and I'll be just using my phone's camera, but I want to take the best photos I can.
Also general iconography thread.
Don’t use flash, icons have a reflective surface and flash will turn into a bright white light on the picture. Try also not to have any other light shining directly at the icon
Here are three pictures of the same icon. One has no flash and the light is coming from another room. The other has flash causing a white light at Mary’s feet. The third has the light on in the same room as the icon, and it’s shining directly at it
It’s best to use natural light from a window, which won’t be directly shined into the icon. If you can’t do that, have light on in the room but don’t shine it directly at the icon
The icon I took a picture of was specially commissioned by my dad, who knows an icon artist. All the saints (including Mary) on this icon are the patron saints of my parents, my siblings, and me
A shame, as someone who is I would suggest any kind of decent camera body (Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony) paired with a fast lens, a circular polarizer and a lens hood. Maximum image definition and minimal glare and reflections.
That said you can get some of these abilities on your phone as well. There's small lenses that attach to phone cameras these days that might have some of the abilities I am talking about but I doubt you can get them on short notice.
Anyway as said, don't use flash due to reflection issues. If it's too dark to get good images, I would suggest you get some VERY bright lights and put some material on it to diffuse it, make it a "soft white" light that doesn't cause a lot of glare. If you can get very bright LED lights (which would not heat up much), I would suggest wax paper over the front of them if you can find nothing else. Otherwise there are professional materials that can be used for those purposes.
Take a hammer with you, and punsh holes in the faces. this increases the quality of the image
Alright, I'm back. I tried to take the best photos I could, but unfortunately he keeps a lot of them in a low light area and I didn't have the luxury of moving them or access to my own light sources. So I apologize if any of these photos are blurry or for any strange lighting or glare.
These icons are all from Russia imported to the USA before the current laws restricting the export of religious iconography. A few are damaged, but most are museum quality.
Enjoy the dump
Maybe I should lower the res. I can only post a few at a time.
