Slides or Digital

I just got a new batch of slides of my paintings from my photographer.

She not only made absolutely perfect slides of my paintings, also took pain to enlighten me on the pros and cons of slides and digital photos for artists. With the popularity of digital photos, I needed to decide if I want to have slide or digital photos only.

Below is the summary of her detailed answer to my questions:

Here is the breakdown of digital vs. slides. The minus of only digital is that since monitors are not color-calibrated among one another, there is no record of what the true colors of your paintings are, only a digital interpretation. For some artists, color accuracy is not a big desire, and they are willing to sacrafice definition in the lower and higher values as digital recordings are not as good at this as film.

What I suggest to most people is if they are very sure that they will only be using my photography for digital purposes, then I can give them just digital files of their work. The file size is between 10-12MB, which you can then reduce in size for internet purposes and can print an 7x9 inch print from without a problem (some folks can even retrieve an 11x14 print depending on the sophistication of the dpi process with the printer).

I have a scanner which yield 12,800 dpi files so my raw scan images are about 25 MB and I can have a large poster made from these scanned images.

For now, I'll stick to slides. Currently, most but not all galleries and competitions accept digital format entries and a small portion take slides.