Meet the Young girls, Olivia and Julia — the lovely subjects of an oil portrait that I completed a few days ago.

The Young Girls, Oil on Canvas, 24" x 24"

The girls' father (who commissioned the double portrait) came to pick it up on the very day it was finished, while it was still wet. (Parts were very wet indeed!) Nevertheless, I needed to record the work for my portfolio before it left the building. So within the short amount of time allotted, I endeavored to get a usable shot.

I decided to first try shooting the painting outside in the shade; an approach that has worked quite well for me in the past, since there's no direct sunlight to cast glaring reflections onto the wet, oily surface. But the intense Texas sun that has caused such a long and fearful drought this year kept finding its way into the shadows — spreading its obscuring light over wet areas of paint in its wake. An overcast day would've been preferable, of course . . . but if we could order up our weather here, we'd certainly never have ordered a drought.

Disappointed, I lugged the work back into the room that I use as a studio, placed it back on the easel, and set up my camera and tripod to take the shot from there. You may be wondering why I didn't try the shot in this room first. The problem is the wall color: a mid-tone blue that has an unfortunate tendency to absorb light.

You see, when you photograph a wet painting, you have to point all of your lights away from the work to avoid flashes of glare (like the ones that appeared in my outside shots). And when you turn all of the light away from a shiny subject matter, you need to find a way to bounce that light back onto your subject's surface, in order to provide enough rebounding illumination to get a clear, detailed, glare-free shot. The way to do this is to either photograph your subject in a white-walled room — or improvise by, say, surrounding your lights, subject, and camera with hanging white bed sheets (something I didn't have time for under the circumstances).

Luckily, the room I work in does have a white ceiling, so I crossed my fingers and bounced the light from there. Although, the resulting image is not the best shot I've ever taken of my artwork (it won't produce a decent print-out, that's for sure), it's not too bad — considering the time constraints and the light-sucking walls. In the final image, the colors as well as the contrasts between lights and shadows suffered, but I was able to correct both of these problems to some degree in Photoshop.