Robin Ferrier suggested that I write about what to buy to photograph one’s own quilts. The problems you need to solve are pretty simple:

• Hang the quilt in a flat manner — you probably already have this if you have a design wall.
• Light the quilt reasonably evenly and maybe show some texture.
• Photograph the quilt so it looks as square as the quilt is, and maybe as sharp and detailed as possible.

I’m going to present a few options, none of them particularly cheap.

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Monday night I had the pleasure of shooting the EBHQ show & tell meeting, where everyone who has a quilt they have finished this year can show it off. Anyone who is looking to have a quilt shot this year, I have a shoot scheduled for December 8th, call or e-mail me for details!

Click the image for all 384 images of quilty goodness:

I’m off to the EBHQ show and tell this evening. I’ll be the guy with the flashes.

Click on the photo here to see a gallery of most of the quilts I’ve shot (organized by artist).

I feel I am still quite young in the art of quilt photography– or the art of photography in general. Susan and LaQuita’s quilts, which I demonstrated in this video, are largely about completely flat copy. Sue Fox, however, makes largely textural quilts with simple graphic design. So I needed to add some more texture to the lighting.

I started with the same setup as the last time, two AlienBee 800’s with muslin socks and R119 diffusion over the standard 7″ reflector. Since all of Sue’s quilts have pockets, we decided to try hanging them upright, and so I needed my texture light to be at the top. The room has a white ceiling, so I wanted to try doing a pretty wide bounce on the ceiling. You can see it here:

I didn’t want the toplight spilling directly onto the quilts, so I fashioned a reflector/gobo out of white coroplast, a little better exposure of it here:

The blue bag hanging below is an external battery pack, since 4 AA batteries don’t really last through a shoot, and it’s nice to just forget about power. The idea with this light is that it evenly rakes the quilt with just a little bit of light (the bulk of the illumination is from the two AB’s in the back of the room) that tends to highlight the top of the quilted pattern. So rather than the quilting going flat, you get subtle highlights at the top of the “bubbles” from the quilting, and subtle shadows above each line of quilting. However, this doesn’t detract from the pattern of the quilt. This image is a good example:

Even at this size, you can see most of the shapes in the texture. I found a shot where I had turned off the frontlight to see what I was getting, it was very underexposed, since I was just going for a test image, but I pulled a black and white image out of it here, thus:

(Click for larger).

I think this method works pretty well– one light that can just add a little bit of definition, and two big bright lights that make sure the quilt is lit completely evenly.

Hey, I realized I had completely forgotten to blog the actual photo from the previous quilt shoot.

This is the very lovely & amazing quilt by Susan Fuller of EBHQ. I believe it is 45″ square or 48″ square.

More on the process here.

And the video/photo was featured on strobist.com.

Both shooting “huge quilts” (10′-6″ x 8′-0″) and a whole bunch of them. I photographed 16 quilts this weekend for two different quilters. I put together some time lapse videos of the shoots. There’s a two-minute abridged version of the setup & two quilts:

Short Form Movie

And a longer five-minute version that shows a lot more of the pre-shoot setup and three quilts:

Long Form Movie

You get to see largely how much work (and pinning) goes into photographing quilts nicely and evenly. The two main lights I’m using are AlienBees B800’s with muslin socks to even out the light. The smaller light is a Nikon Speedlight SB-600 and was mostly on the floor to provide texture in the wide shots, or on a stand to one side to bring out the texture in the close up shots.

The big board things I’m hanging in the beginning are 4′x10′ homasote covered flats, which are then wrapped in batting and a slightly fuzzy fabric. We then cover these with a 128″ wide seamless grey fabric. The batting and homasote let us pin right into the backdrop, and it worked great (this was the first shoot we were trying this method).

I typically shoot quilts upside down. This is because I want the texture light to be coming from “above”, but it’s hard to hang a light up there and control it in this space. What I do is hang the quilt upside down, then light from below (which is the top of the quilt), and then flip the image when I process it. Occasionally something on the quilt won’t permit this, but on most quilts it’s a fine way to photograph them.

Longarm 2Originally uploaded by blp1979.

Longer post forthwith, but here’s a picture for now.

Sue Fox is a quilter with a studio in Berkeley where I do my larger quilt photography. She’s an awesome person, and does beautiful work. This is a shot of her LongArm machine, idly enjoying a President’s Day off.

We’ve now gotten the huge pinboards built, although not quite finished, in her studio, which will speed quilt photography– the longest part is getting the quilts hung square on the wall. We figured out that you really just need a huge (in this case, 10′x12′) board to pin into.
Update: the results of the giant pinboard are here: http://photo.benpeoples.com/2007/03/25/huge-quilt-shoot/
I have Sue Fox’s contact information, if anyone is searching the web and finds me first — just drop me a line at the address below