Digital camera and lense for 2D art work photography

[kylkee@charter.net]

Hey! What kind of digital camera would be good to photograph artwork, flat paintings? Do I need a special lens? Digital SLR or fixed lens? Megapixels? Thanks Kyle

[Photo-John]

You want to use a long lens for "copywork." Longer lenses flatten out your subject and ensure straight edges. Pretty much any digital camera with an optical zoom lens will work, optically. Resolution will depend on what kind of final product you're looking to produce. If you want to make posters, a high-resolution digital SLR is probably a good idea. If you only want to post copies to the Internet, resolution isn't an issue at all.

Give us some more information about what you want to photograph and what you want to do with the images and we can probably give you some more direction.

[kylkee@charter.net]

Thank you for your response,John! I paint water colors. I want a camera to photograph my work to make prints about 13x19 inches. I've heard I would need a lens to keep the image flat. What do you recomend? What do you think of the Nikon D-70 slr digital camera? Thanks Kyle

You want to use a long lens for "copywork." Longer lenses flatten out your subject and ensure straight edges. Pretty much any digital camera with an optical zoom lens will work, optically. Resolution will depend on what kind of final product you're looking to produce. If you want to make posters, a high-resolution digital SLR is probably a good idea. If you only want to post copies to the Internet, resolution isn't an issue at all.

Give us some more information about what you want to photograph and what you want to do with the images and we can probably give you some more direction.

[Dzerzhinski46]

Like John said, a long lens would keep your image nice and flat. If you use a DSLR, go for something like 150mm or a little longer. Moderate telephoto, like is used for portrait work. As for resolution, if you are doing 13x19 prints from photos, anything higher than 4MP should be alright. Others may say that 4MP is on the edge of good 35mm resolution, but I have never noticed the difference. Though if you got a D70, it is easily 6MP anyways, so that would not be a problem. Hope this helps.

Dzerzhinski

[kylkee@charter.net]

Thank you John and Dzerzhinski! Your info is helpful. Kyle

[another view]

I guess it depends on what these digital photographs will be used for. If it's for samples of your work to send to art shows or for web posting etc, then you probably could get by with a compact digital point & shoot as long as your technique is good. By that, I mean putting the camera on a tripod, making sure the camera is in the exact center of the artwork, having smooth, even light on the piece, etc. The long end of the zoom on most of these cameras should be OK, but because of how optics work you'll want something pretty long with a camera like this. Most of them list focal lengths with a "35mm equivalent", and I'd look for a number well over 100.

A DSLR like a Canon Digital Rebel or Nikon D70 will give you other options but I'm not sure you need them for this specific purpose.