No, I didn't paint this beautiful piece of art - and artist named Kerry Minnion did - I gave it a digital life. This sort of thing can't be scanned in as it's 60-some by 30-some inches, not exactly scannable material.

If anyone out there has dealt with photographing paintings, then you'll know that it's not about holding a camera up to painting and clicking the button. There's more to it than that, much more, if I may say so. Want to know how much more? Alright, let's talk about it.

I didn't take a picture of the gear I used, but you'll need the following and the reasons why:

• Tripod: Essential piece of equipment for photographing artwork. You'll actually spend as much time leveling the tripod as you will balancing your lights. It is imperative that you place the camera directly in the vertical and horizontal center of the painting so both the edges and the content aren't distorted. If you mess this part up, you're going to spend a long time correcting the distortion, and you might not even be able to fix it, which means you have to start all over again.
• Camera with manual settings: Yeah, a DSLR will probably be your best bet - but there are a few point-and-shoot cameras out there that allow you to manually control the aperture and shutter speed. Crank that aperture down to around f/8-f/11 (depends on where the sweet-spot of your particular lens is - you don't want diffraction, so don't go overboard) for sharpness.
• Lights: Notice how I didn't say you needed a camera with the ability to fire off-camera lights? That's because you don't need one - that's how I did it, but you can always use hot-lights or even lamps. Yup, lamps. As long as all of the bulbs are identical in their color temperature, you're good to go. Just match the color temperature of the bulbs in-camera and you'll be fine.
• Distance: This one's free, but sometimes hard to come-by. You need to separate yourself from the painting as much as possible. Put it this way, the closer you are to the painting, the more barrel-distortion you're going to create. If you have an 18-50mm lens, zoom-out to 50mm and find your place in the room.
• Software: Find yourself some photo-editing software when you're done shooting and chop-away those edges. If you framed it correctly, it should take a few seconds. If you goofed, it's going to take much longer.

There's your materials-list. How about some of the process?

Notice how washed out the color is with this one? It's bad, really bad. There's even a glare on the left-side of the painting. All-around bad stuff. This is what you get when you take your camera and point it at a painting.

So we essentially turn the lights out, but not in the traditional sense, we increase the shutter-speed to cancel out the ambient light. If you look closely, you can still see some detail (it looks like smudges). That's about right where it should be. Now we have to add some light.

So here's one-light bounced off a white ceiling (you can't do that if the ceiling is any other color) on the right side. We're getting there. You'll notice how the light is perfect in the upper-right corner, then gets weaker as you look towards the lower-left corner. Not quite where we want to be yet, but we're getting closer.

All three lights (left, center, and right) are working their magic - all diffused via the ceiling - are doing exactly what they need to do. After that's done the image needs some contrast and sharpening. Our cameras can't see the dynamic range our eyes can (not yet, anyway) so you need to boost the contrast. You know you've got it when you look at the both the photo and the painting and you don't see a difference - if you do, you're either under or over-compensating. The sharpening is just to add a punch of clarity to the hard edges. Just like with contrast, don't over-do it.

So that's it - it's not rocket-science, but it's also not as simple as pointing and clicking.