Assemble Your Equipment

1. 35mm camera with light meter
2. tripod
3. color slide film for outdoors (i.e. Ektachrome Daylight 100) enough for 3 slides each of your work
4. your work
5. push pins, nails etc. for hanging the work

Starting Up

For this system to work, it must be sunny outside. For indoor shooting, turn off all the lights in the room, so that the sun is your only source of light. You want a clean-white or near-white wall, that is well lit but not in direct sunlight. You want to minimize shadows. For outdoors shooting, choose a white wall in the shade.

Clear the wall of any obstructions.

Set up your tripod.

Start by pinning up a painting. If you have sculpture, use a white pedestal or spread a piece of white paper on the floor and place your work on that.

With the work in place, and your camera in hand, turn on the light meter and go right up to within 3 or 4 inches of surface of your work. Make sure the reading is taken in a gray or neutral area. A mostly white or black area will render a false meter reading. Set your F-stop (the exposure) to the correct light meter reading. Turn off the light meter. Walk back to your tripod and attach the camera to it. Focus the piece leaving a small margin of white wall around your work. If you turn on your light meter now you will see that it will indicate an overexposure. DISREGARD THIS READING. The true reading is the one you obtained by going right up to your work. Make sure the shutter speed is set at 60. If the meter reading forces you to go below a 60th of a second, use a cable release or the time release button to avoid shaking the camera. Shoot one slide at this exposure. Now carefully advance your exposure one F-stop higher so the light meter reads "overexposed." Shoot a slide here. Now carefully return to your original F-stop setting and go back one F-stop lower so the light meter reads "underexposed" and one in the middle of those two exposures. This is called "bracketing," and the reason for doing it this way is to assure you at least one good slide with the right exposure, out of the three you took.

For instance, say you take a light meter reading directly off the piece of the F-stop exposure is at 4. You will shoot one slide at 4, one an F-stop higher, say 5.6, and one an F-stop lower, say 2.8. Some people prefer to go only half stop higher and half stop lower. You can decide.

Proceed now in exactly the same way for all of your work. With sculpture and the other 3-dimensional work, you'll probably want to take 3 or 4 shots of the same piece from different angles.

When you have chosen your best slides, label them with your name, the year the work was completed, the dimensions, the media and title, if any. Write small! Store them in archival quality plastic slide sheets, in a binder. If you want you can have several duplicates made from your best slides, so you'll have copies to send around. Always save the originals for your own personal file. Remember, if you ever want to have your slides returned to you, include a stamped self-addressed envelope marked SLIDES DO NOT BEND. Otherwise you'll never see your slides again.