Please join me in welcoming the Photographer's Oil Collective, a sister site of Strobist.com. At Strobist, we teach lighting. With POC, rather than just create painterly light, a photographer can now create a museum-quality oil painting—and do so at a surprisingly accessible cost.

The painting seen above measures 36x48", and was done by POC artist Zhixing Zhang from a photo by photographer R.J. Kern. It is typical of the work POC painters can create from a professional wedding photographer's reference image.



I first ventured into the rabbit hole of high-end oil reproduction in 2012. It started as a spur-of-the-moment idea to translate a photo that already had great sentimental value into something that would exist in our family for many generations.

Having shot the photo of my kids in 2008, I was long familiar with it. But when the painting (seen above) arrived I was surprised by how strongly I reacted to it. It somehow felt much more significant than the photo. A collaboration between subject, photographer and a skilled artist 10,000 miles away.

A painting is, well,different. Producing it is a time-consuming and organic process, with half a dozen layers of semi-transparent oil. Skin tones look luminous.

My first experience with reproduction oil painting was that of an enthusiast photographer. Literally, a dad with a camera. As I spent more time with the painting, and thinking about the personal value that it unlocked for me, I starting thinking of it in the context of professional photographers. With the right painters and the right training (on both sides of the image creation process) this could unlock great value and entirely new business models for us.

With prints, we quietly acknowledge that we are competing on price with the photo lab at the neighborhood drugstore. With paintings, we are competing with artists who routinely charge thousands of dollars for a simple portrait. And much more for larger/more complex work.

But in theory at least, we could produce better work — and at a cost that would create a new business model for photographers. There was so much potential.



So I traveled to Xiamen, China, where Zhixing Zhang lives and paints. Xiamen is a world center for commercial oil painting, and Mr. Zhang is a leader in the community of artists who live there. With the help of a team of local art directors and translators, we searched among the over 5,000 oil painters in the city to create a small group of hand-picked artists. As a result, we were now partnered with four exceptional reproduction oil painters.

A good start.

But they would need to learn to think like photographers; to develop a better understanding for our needs. They'd have to more closely align their palette with the more muted colors in what the West sees as classic paintings. So we commissioned multiple rounds of paintings from each of our painters, fine-tuning them as we went, to be able to better work with photographers.

And the education would not end there. Photographers would also need to learn how to create photos that could be best reproduced as oil paintings. For both sides, education would be the key to bridging that knowledge gap. But that sort of thing is our bread and butter at Strobist.

The information photographers need to know (to meet the painters halfway) is now in place. At POC we are adding to that knowledge base continually. Our growing list of white papers will include education on technical considerations, shooting/lighting methods, business models and more. In short, it will contain everything you will need to know to become capable of producing a beautiful painting — for your clients, or for yourself.

I have spent the last ten years learning to think outside of the box as a photographer; to challenge assumptions and to unlock possibilities. Strobist.com is one of the results of that line of thinking.

We are proud to now introduce the Photographer's Oil Collective. With studios in Xiamen and administrative offices in Dubai, photographers anywhere in the world can now create museum-quality oil portraiture for their clients — or for their own walls.
__________


Credits, from top:
POC Painting by Zhixing Zhang from a Photo by R.J. Kern
POC Painting by Zhixing Zhang from a Photo by David Hobby
POC Painting by Zhixing Zhang from a Photo by Alex Mazurov