Painters: When taking a photograph of your piece do you photograph only the artwork?

Sometimes I just do the piece and others I include a mat (no frame, no glass—avoid glare).

Just the artwork itself.

Examples here: http://downtide.deviantart.com/

I usually like to picture it in a background.

I do professional copy work for high end gallery artists and museums. It’s always just the artwork with no borders or background… like this and this.

I’m just hoping that ‘your piece’ means ‘the thing you painted’.

I further hope that ‘the thing you painted’ isn’t a body part.

I photograph my art and some surrounding area so I can correct for parallax if need be.
I never add generated borders, but I have a series of images of antique and other frames that I sometimes use, especially with digital art. see here and here

@anartist brings up a good point. When copying artwork for publication, it is best to over shoot with a loose crop. This allows for exact parallax correction later in PS. Much easier to do, as it is very difficult to get camera exactly centered, and most folks don’t have a completely distortion free lens made specifically for copy work.