When I started painting, I always worked from life. A couple of years ago I realized that working from life, although it is a great way to work, severely restricted the types of poses I could paint. I wanted to paint movement --- crowds of people, skateboarders in mid-air, dancers, and revelers. I bought a point and shoot camera. It worked well enough, but it had some drawbacks. Maybe it was a blessing when Lucy ate my camera because the old camera gave me a chance to learn what to look for in a camera for reference photographs.

SLR or Point and Shoot?

Camera snobs will tell you that you need an SLR, but I'm not convinced. An SLR is not going to magically give you a better reference photo. You can get the exposure wrong on an SLR just as much as with a point and shoot. Depth of field doesn't make much difference because your photo is not a final product; you can always blur parts of your painting. Megapixels don't matter; anything over about 3 megapixels is fine for a reference photo. Zoom range doesn't matter either; some compact point and shoots have the equivalent zoom range of a 300mm SLR lens.

Here are the real advantages of an SLR:

• Speed - Even after you depress the shutter halfway to autofocus, a point and shoot camera has a delay of about 1/3 of a second between the time you press the shutter and when the camera takes the picture. With an SLR, the shutter delay is imperceptible. If you are shooting a still life or a landscape, this delay doesn't matter. If you are photographing a crowd or a person in motion, however, 1/3 of a second is an eternity. It's long enough for someone's head or hand to appear between you and your subject, and it's long enough for a fast-moving subject to completely disappear from the frame.
• Control over Lighting - If you are willing to use an external flash that is mounted off-camera, then an SLR can give you more control over lighting your subject. If you are working indoors, you should avoid using your camera's built in flash or an external flash mounted on the camera because the direct light eliminates all the shadows and flattens the form. In a figure drawing session, you never want to sit next to the main light; in photography, you never want the main light source to be on your camera. (It's okay to use on-camera flash in the sun because the sun will be brighter than the flash.)
• Lenses - An SLR also gives you more lens choices, which can be important for certain subjects and styles of painting. One of my favorite watercolorists, John Salminen, uses a telephoto lens to get a spatial compression that is essential to his design. Similarly, a fast, fixed lens will allow you to get pictures in low light situations without a flash. If you want to take reference photos of people in dimly lit restaurants and bars, you need a much faster lens than you can get with a point and shoot camera.

A point and shoot camera gives you one enormous advantage: portability. You can't take a good picture unless you have your camera with you. You can put a point and shoot camera in your pocket or your purse, and it's always there when you need it.

What Did I Eventually Buy?

I couldn't make up my mind, and I bought two cameras: a point and shoot and an SLR. I keep the point and shoot, a Panasonic DMC-TZ5S, with me all the time. I use the SLR, a Nikon D60, when I am on an expedition to take reference photos. I use the SLR when I know that that I am going to be shooting in less than optimum circumstances such as fast moving subjects or low light.

For example, suppose you are planning to do a 22" x 30" painting, and your sketchbook is 8.5x11. Enter the numbers in the form, click the "Calculate!" button, and you will see that you will need to crop your sketchbook page to 8.07 x 11 to keep the proportion the same as your full sheet.

I'm having trouble getting this to work inside the blog. If you're interested, take a look at it on my other website.

early morning
photo

late morning
photo

Here is an example of what I encountered. I took the first photo at the beginning of the painting session, around 9:00 a.m. I took the second photo about two hours later. The switch from the lighting conditions of the first photo to the lighting of the second photo happened very suddenly a little after 10 a.m.

When I got home, I found a utility at the U. S. Naval Observatory that will calculate the altitude and azimuth of the sun at specified intervals for any location on any day. This is a very handy tool for learning how to predict shifts in outdoor lighting. Later in the day, I returned to the cemetery with compass and an azimuth table in hand and realized that the tables confirmed what I had observed while painting.

Working outdoors in the summer, there are 4 ways an object can be lighted. Assuming that a building is on a north/south axis*, the lighting changes when the azimuth of sun reaches 90 degrees, 180 degrees, and 270 degrees. In the winter and early spring, the sun crosses the 90 and 270 degree thresholds before sunrise or after sunset. Here are a few illustrations of these phases of light:

Sunrise to 90 degrees

The north and east sides of a building are in sunlight. In early July in Atlanta, this stage lasts from sunrise to 10:20 a.m.

90 degrees to 180 degrees

The east and south sides of a building are in sunlight. This stage lasts from 10:20 a.m. to 1:40 p.m.

180 degrees to 270 degrees

The south and west sides are in sunlight. This stage lasts from 1:40 p.m. to 5:10 p.m.

270 degrees until sunset

The west and north sides are in sunlight. This stage lasts from 5:10 p.m. until sunset.

* - Note: If the building is not on a north/south axis, it is still easy to calculate when the light will change. Simply figure out how many degrees the building is oriented from north, and then add or subtract that interval to the light shift intervals. For example, the north side of my house is actually about 26 degrees west of north. To figure out when there will be a major light shift, I subtract 26 from 90, 180, and 270 respectively, and then read the azimuth table. (return to text)