Reproduction
September 4, 2009 § 1 Comment
Photo © Bjørn Winsnes.
I’ve had the privilege of doing some reproduction/copy photography for renowned Norwegian photographer and illustrator Bjørn Winsnes. At 84, he has always been working with film and didn’t have any of his photos available as files.
He’s having an exhibition next week, and needed digital versions for the exhibit website. For various reasons I had to take the photos from the prints, most of which were quite dusty and some had a lot of scratches. I did, however manage to overcome most of these problems using this basic reproduction setup:
The repro setup.
I used a plexiglass still life table to place the prints on. A strobe was placed on each side at about 40° to the table and at a distance of about 50 cm. This produced even illumination of the print with no light reflections. The one thing I lacked was a stand to place the camera directly over the print, so I had to stand on a low stool and lean out over the table. Not an optimal solution, but using a circular polarizer filter on the camera, I was able to remove most of the reflections. This also took care of the worst scratches. The lens was set to normal focal length (27 mm for the APS-C CMOS of my Canon 30D) to avoid any perspective distortion of the edges.
The camera settings were:
- Focal length: 27 mm
- ISO 100
- Aperture: ƒ/11
- Shutter: 1/250
I had the prints with me in the post work, and did some minor exposure and white balance adjustments in Lightroom to closely match the images with the originals. It’s a bit scary to reproduce another photographer’s work, but the images turned out nice and Mr. Winsnes was very pleased to get the files. Check out his work (and my repro work) on his website. I love all of it, especially his multiple exposure work and intricate color illustrations.
Photo © Bjørn Winsnes.
The Sterile Eye 
Wow, that’s really cool!