Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Photography Love!

Well, it finally came. I received my portable photography studio on Monday, but because of school I hadn't been able to play with it until today. It is so neat, because everything stores in this portable case with a handle. This case is actually what pops up to become the studio.

Everything I need came with it. The case opens up and their are 3 walls that you open up. It has black, white, red and blue backdrops, 2 lights and a camera tripod. The 2 side walls act as filters for the lights. You set your lights outside the walls and shine them through  the walls to filter the light so that you get less reflection on the objects you are photographing.

I had two initial pendants that I recently wrapped that I photographed today to try it out. The first one is this letter B initial pendant:










It is black fused glass and green dichroic glass, wrapped with gun metal colored wire. The top picture shows the true green color of the dichroic glass and the true dark silver color of the wire. The picture on the wright shows the correct green color of the dichroic glass, but the wire color has a slight yellow look, so I should have probably moved the lights slightly.





The next photograph I took was of this letter M initial pendant:













This piece of dichroic glass is more of a blue/green/silver color depending on the way the light hits it. The color of the glass in the photographs matches the color of the glass in the actual pendant. However, the wire color in the pictures is lighter than the actual antiqued bronze color that it is. So, again, I probably need to adjust my lights.

I did edit these in Photoshop, but the only edits I made were to crop the pictures, reduce the file size, and brush out a couple of dog hairs that Cheyenne has already donated to the studio that I didn't see when I took the picture (lol). I didn't do any color correcting.

Overall, I am really happy with the set up. Glass is notoriously hard to photograph because of the reflection on your light source. Having this set up is much better. Here is one of my previous pictures:

You can see much more of a reflection of the light source on the glass and the sterling silver, plus the heavy shadow behind it. I think that I will get better as I practice with it and experiment with placement of the lights. I can already see that is going to save me lots of time with photo editing and color correction.

I apologize to everyone who just wants to see jewelry for going on and on about the portable studio. But, I know my jewelry making friends are always looking for input on tools to make their photographs better.

Monday, January 2, 2012

Feeling Retro...

I'm not quite sure why, but over the holiday break I had this strong urge to crochet something. Now, I used to crochet all of the time, but I literally haven't touched any of my crochet hooks in years. I do have lots of yarn because sometimes I use it in the kumihmo (japanese braiding) I do for jewelry.

Anyhow, I went upstairs and dug through all of the junk in my work room and found my crochet hooks. I figured since it is winter and getting cold I would like to have a nice, warm infinity scarf (if you are a guy, and you don't know what that is, it is a circular scarf with no ends...lol). A nice, simple, single-crochet pattern that wasn't too taxing since I hadn't done it for awhile. I finished it up yesterday during the Bengals game (boo!-they lost, yay! they're in the play offs anyway). It was great because it gave me something to do and I didn't have to haul the wire, tools, beads, and glass downstairs to watch TV.

Here are two pictures of the scarf. As you can see, I wasn't happy with just the scarf. It needed a pin to go with it and I obliged (it always comes back to the jewelry, doesn't it?). I think it turned out very nice and I can't wait to wear it. I also have an idea that I might put a couple of scarf/pin combos in the Etsy shop. What do you think? I need some input on this.