Fooling your camera?

[Ant Carlos]

Mike, thank you.
You are always ready to discuss those kind of issues and I appreciate that.
I understand your point and no way you made the water muddier. Actually I think you explanation is very clear and may be close to the answer. What Terri shows us is an ilustration of what you said. When she added the whole spectrum to the field her camera created a much more balanced picture of her work. It's very like what I did when I put my arm in front of the camera and provided more 3D shapes and colors for it to deal with. I found that resulted in a more natural representation of my painting.
Anyway, what I really wonder is if the camera capability of seeing colors out of range of the human eye doesn't play a role in this act. I refer again to astrophotos (I am an amateur astronomer myself and had the chance to testify several times that what our eyes see are much less than what the camera sees and register). Just google for some shots of the milky way. You'll see many colors that your naked eye can't see. So my question still remains: is the camera showing some frequencies of liight that we painters cannot spot, so we always find our photographed works uglier than the original?

[Mike McCarty]

So my question still remains: is the camera showing some frequencies of liight that we painters cannot spot, so we always find our photographed works uglier than the original?

To tell you the truth - I don't really know.

There are a couple of truths that we won't be able to get around. One: we're stuck with our eyes. Two: we're stuck with the current iteration of camera technology, which by the way is truly remarkable.

When I take the final, final photo of my artwork I want it to be as dense with pixels as I can make it. This means that I want to fill the frame only with my painting to the extent that I can. I don't want to waste any pixels on the wall behind, or any other artifacts. This, so I don't have to crop some portion of the photo image away, thus leaving pixels on the table, so to speak. If, because the difference between the shape of my painting and the shape of my photo image is such that I have a portion that must be cropped out, then I want to fill that space with a matte black cloth. This method has given me my best color reproduction. Beyond that, if my camera is good and if my procedure is good then any variations from what is real and what is depicted should be small, difficult to measure, and probably insignificant in the grand scheme of things.