Christopher Campbell built a copy stand to photograph flat works of art up to 54 inches long. The camera arm locks securely in place and is counterweighted. A grid of aluminum extrusions supports the flat copy board. Four flash units provide even lighting across the copy board. Using a high megapixel Sony camera, macro lens, and focus peaking, Campbell can precisely focus and see dust in paintings. He achieves the most accurate color using custom camera profiles built with an X-Rite color checker chart.

1. I designed and built a copy stand 96” (244 cm) tall using T-slot aluminum extru-
sions and components from 80/20 Inc., which makes it possible to photograph
flat works of art up to about 54” (140 cm) in length. The camera arm glides on lin-
ear polyethylene bearings and locks securely in place, and is fully counter-weight-
ed with a pulley and stainless steel cable. The copy board (MDF skinned front and
back with laminate) is supported by a grid of 80/20 extrusions that keep it abso-
lutely flat, and the whole is supported by four fine adjustment screws that allow
precise camera to copy board leveling using a Hasselblad Linear Mirror Unit and
zig-align lens mirrors.
Using the trigonometry and isolux diagrams from Sidney Ray’s Applied Photo-
graphic Optics, the light supplied by four Einstein E640 flash units is almost per-
fectly even across the whole copy board. The camera is a Sony a7Rii (42 MP),
with a Metabones adapter and either a 50 mm or 100 mm Zeiss Makro-Planar
lens, and a Lee compendium lens shade to block non-image forming light. To
compose and focus precisely, I feed an HDMI signal from the camera to an adja-
cent 24” NEC display, where I use focus peaking at 12.5x to see the dust embed-
ded in the paint surface. After focusing, I turn off the overhead lights, and trigger
the camera and flashes with a Sony IR remote and PocketWizard PlusX wireless
transmitters and receivers.
I am getting the most accurate color and tonal scale I’ve ever experienced using
camera profiles I built using the X-Rite ColorChecker SG chart and basICColor
input 5.1. Adobe Lightroom is my preferred cataloging and editing application for
most of my photographic work, and the basICColor Repro+ profile (DCP) for this
set-up is a huge improvement over Adobe Standard. For preservation-grade re-
productions, I created a basICColor profile for Capture One Pro 10 (ICC) using
the Linear Response curve, which meets all FADGI and Metamorfoze standards.
www.cbcampbell.com
Christopher Campbell
An Artist’s Experience with Fine Art Reproduction
Christopher Campbell works with basICColor input 5
It has been common practice to create custom ICC profiles for digital cameras
used in fine art reproduction. However, many photographers use Adobe Camera
Raw (ACR) in Photoshop or Lightroom as their main acquisition and image cor-
rection/editing tool. In ACR, a special type of profile, a “Digital Camera Profile”
(DCP) — also sometimes called a DNG or Raw profile — is automatically used.
The default profiles were not created for the subtleties of art reproduction, but
rather for getting pleasing color in typical images with green grass and blue skies.
No other application supports the use of custom DCP profiles, so we at basICCo-
lor therefore decided to create custom profiles from a variety of targets to finely
optimize the reproduction of works of art. To show the flexibility of this approach,
we are presenting the work of artist and photographer Christopher Campbell with
two types of subject matter, photographs of paintings on display in various mu-
seums using available light, as well as photographs of Christopher’s own work
using a controlled copy set-up.
www.basiccolor.eu
Franz Herbert, basICColor