photographing flat art

I have a job photographing paintings. Usually you would put a colour chart there. But I live in Malawi, and noone

here sells them. Is there a way of getting realistic colours from the printing house? It is going to be printed

on a calendar. Can I make a useful colour chart by printing pure C-M-Y-K, or something? Should I use the white

balance on the camera?

Do you have access to a gray card? Also what kind of lighting are you using? Is it flash or a daylight corrected source or just tungsten. The closer to daylight the more accurate the final image.

I am going to use mains flash, which is much, much more consistent in colour temperature than daylight. Yes I do have a grey card. Is that neutral grey enough to balance the colour?

Gray card should work fairly well as it's a universal standard and something your printing house should be able to balance

to, especially since you have it in your possession, though it's not going to be as useful as a Macbeth chart. Just keep in

mind that color reproduction is by its very nature inaccurate, so don't expect perfection. Flash should work fine and I'm

assuming you're also planning on shooting raw.

Should I set the white balance using the gray card?

Should I include the gray card in every photo, or include a photo with the gray card in the folder for the printer? I do not know which printer they are going to use, so I cannot ask him.

Yes I'll be shooting raw, which means in the conversion to tiff I can still mess things up...

Colour reproduction in Malawi tends to be less accurate than in the west anywya, but I want to do it as well as possible.

Would it be of any use to print the pure cyan, magenta and yellow ink from a desktop printer on photo paper, or is that totally off?

You only need to include the gray card in one shot as long as you shoot everything the same. Nor do you need to do a white balance if you're shooting under daylight conditions as that's what the camera is optimized for in the first place. Since you're using flash you should just be able to use AWB and shoot, but you could also set it on daylight or flash as well to see if there is any real difference (this really depends on your camera model as each camera is different). But since you're shooting under controlled conditions there's nothing stopping you from experimenting all you wish. Out of curosity which camera are you using and how large will the final enlargment be?

The camera is a Fuji S2. I'll probably use a Nikon 50mm f1.4 or if the work turns out to be small a 135 f2.8

I do not know the final size of the prints, but I'll just shoot raw, and convert to tiff at max resolution.

The reason I asked about your camera and final enlargment size is that some who do copy work that's designed for big enlargments are starting to use the pano stitching technique to increase their final quality. Don't know whether that would be applicable in your case but if you do find that they want to make large prints you might consider it.

Thanx