LED Lighting for Art Studio and Photography

I'm a painter and I've looked through your website and received quite the education. I have 4' CRI Phillips T-8 CRI 90 tubes I purchased years ago for overhead in my studio. These need to be changed but, my first concern is lamps for photographing my oil paintings. Varnish applied to oil paintings creates glare. For photography, I'd like to have lamps on either side pointing at 45 degrees to the painting, with linear polarizing film filters plus another polarizing filter on the camera lens.

The wattage is equivalent to a 60 W incandescent. For photographing painting the f-stop needs to be fairly high to have a wide depth of field to keep the complete painting in focus. I'm assuming the E 26 A9 would require multiple bulbs on each side due to the distance from the painting and the light loss due to the linear polarizing filters. Your bulbs/ lamps are appealing. 

Our NorthLux A19 lamps do indeed sound like a great option for your painting photography. These bulbs feature 95 CRI and daylight-calibrated light output, which means they are perfect for image capture without any loss of color accuracy. Because the light source is fundamentally calibrated to full-spectrum daylight, there should not be any need for white balance or color correction adjustments.

​The only "unknown" at this point, as you mention, is the total brightness needed. This is a bit more difficult to provide a definitive answer to, as various factors such as camera ISO settings, canvas size, distance from the canvas, etc can all play a factor. My recommendation would be to try out various configurations such as lamp quantity, orientation, and distance to see what works best for you. The A19 / E26 form factor ensures that these lamps will fit in virtually all standard bulb fixtures.

​I certainly agree that multiple lamps from various angles would be helpful, especially to ensure that you have even illumination across the painting when the photographs are taken.

Question posted under:

Art studio lightingA19 Bulbs (60 watt equivalent)D50 (printing, digitizing)

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