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.