Lovely lavender

As you might have noticed from my product pictures in the shop, I am very fond of lavender.

The dried flowers tend to be my go-to background for all my pics, as I reckon the lovely pale grey looks great against my silver goodies.

This years crop is doing well, and our buzzy friends are going wild for it. I try and leave it until the bees have had their fill before harvesting it! It still looks pretty in my book.

I can almost smell that fantastic scent as I write...

New Studio - Update

Our builders have been really cracking on with the build. It'll be 3 weeks tomorrow. (Is that all??)
And my new studio has changed from this....

To this...

and yesterday the front wall started going up...!

I must point out that I'm only having a teeny corner of what was the garage, not the whole thing (now wouldn't that be nice?) but I do know I'm a very lucky girl to be getting a little room I can leave all my stuff out in. Not ideal to have oxygen and propane tanks in reach of the kids!

Tip Share - Adding a texture

At the same time as getting a new camera, I splashed out on Photoshop Elements. Elements is the cheaper, cut down version of Photoshop but seems to do everything I need (and more).

In case it's helpful, before that I was using Picassa which was fine, and free - I'd definitely recommend it.

Elements is great though, and I'm having loads of fun trying out new ways to edit my photos, while I'm learning I thought I'd put a few tip shares on the blog, in case they are any use to others.... (and make a good reference for me when I forget what on earth I'm supposed to do!). I'm not saying this is the correct way to do this, I have no idea, I'm just playing, and sharing what I learn. If I find out that I'm doing it completely wrong, I'll come back and edit this post.

Anyway, here's a photo I took at the fair recently.....

To add a texture to this all I did was open a new layer, by clicking on the layer heading, and then the "new layer" option.

You can then change the name on these layers by double clicking on them in the layer box in the lower right hand corner of the screen. Probably a useful habit to get into, as if you start making a lot of layers it can get confusing! Call the new layer "texture".

Then highlight the "texture layer", and go and find the texture you're going to use.

There are lots of free textures to be found on flickr or just google "free textures"

Here's a link to get you started...

http://www.photoshoproadmap.com/Photoshop-blog/2008/11/30/60-impressive-free-high-resolution-textures-and-backgrounds/

I chose this one.. http://www.flickr.com/photos/emeraldrose/2832585353/sizes/l/

Once you have your texture, right click and copy it. Then go back to Photoshop elements, and Edit>Paste it on the new texture layer... Just double check that the texture layer is highlighted before you paste, or else it'll cover the image!

Next just stretch out the texture by grabbing each edge. Stretch it right over the original picture until you can't see it anymore.

Once you've done that, see the  "opacity" button, just above the layer section on the right hand side. If you click on that a slider appears. For this one I slid it down to 40%


Then I flatten the image, by going into the layer menu, and choosing Flatten image, to keep all the layers together.

Hey presto - done!

And here's the finished picture...

What do you think?

Colour Palette - Bright and Shiny Earrings

I've just found a fab colour palette template from the brandi girl blog.

It's in Photoshop Elements, so I've downloaded the trial and am having a play around with it, to see if it will do better for my pictures than Picassa (which is free and nice and easy).

But whether it can or not, the fact that I can easily (with the help of the template!) make these cool little colour palettes is a definite plus.

Do you use photoshop? Does it get any easier??

Macro is my friend

The sun finally came out over the weekend, and I decided to take some pictures of my newest jewellery makes so I could finally load it up in the shops. ( I have been slacking!)

You all know already that photos are vital if you want to sell anything online, and with jewellery in particular you really need a great photo that picks up all the detail, and colour of the item.

You might remember me playing with my camera a few months ago here and here; I realised then that just taking 5 minutes to play with the settings on my camera made all the difference. This weekend I played around with the Macro button.

 Don't get me wrong, I use macro, I often use macro - honest! But I don't always, and wasn't really sure what difference if any it really made.

Basically, all you need to do is press the macro button, which usually has a flower on it (see above!), and the computer moves the lens around to focus really close up on an object - which could even be just inches away. 

So here are the results of my very complicated, and time consuming experiement (ahem) ok 30 seconds in the garden.

 With the macro

Without the macro

I've made the pictures bigger so you can really see the difference. You can really pick up all the detail with the macro function... can you see how the pattern of the middle part of flower is so much clearer, 

BUT just a couple of issues to bear in mind...

Shadows - as you get closer in, it's alot easier to cast a shadow over the object you are trying to photograph

Depth of field - as usual, you only get focus on a particular part of the photo, but with the macro button the area that is in focus is reduced. This means you have to be careful to get the focus covering the right area!

Flash - you can't usually use a flash in macro mode, because you're generally so close to the object that the flash wouldn't illuminate it properly.

But that's it - easy peasy! A brilliant excuse to go off and explore the world in close up... would love to see your macro shots if you have any....add a link in the comments below.

Photo background

On a trip this weekend to the local pet shop to buy a goldfish for the girls I finally spotted some grey slate stone in a dark corner to use as a background in my pictures. I've been looking in garden centres and the like for ages!

These are some rather hurried photos I took in the garden this afternoon, without a light box - so please excuse the poor lighting, overshine, and reflection of me and the camera in the shot!

I will re-do the pictures when I have longer than five minutes to spend, but I really needed to get them listed.

I really like the dark grey against the silver - it really makes it stand out, so you can see the all the detail, which I usually find really tricky with my the more subtle silver and crystal jewellery.

Playing around with my camera - 2

Sorry to those folks not obsessed with talking photos of small shiny objects, BUT....

following on from my earlier post about playing with my camera. My next experiment was to change the white balance (WB) settings.This is one of the top tips I'd come across in the forums.

WHITE BALANCE

So with the lightbox out and the exposure upped slightly, I looped through all the WB settings.. and here goes:

Sunshine setting - (above)

 

Auto WB setting

 

inside light setting (cripes!)

 

flash

 

Shade

 

Personal setting

I think I like the personal one best,(but still not bright enough). To set the personal option I just had to point the camera at the white card, click set, and it figured it out for me.

 

 Anyway the matt black agate on sterling silver almond earwires are in the shop now...(click on the pic)!

I'm sure everyone else knows this  camera stuff already, and I'm really sorry to bore people who don't have there own shop, and will never need to take pics of their handmade jewellery....but it's been a useful lesson for me!

 

Playing around with my camera - part 1

Grrrr taking photos of my jewellery drives me mad!

I've been reading up lots of different tips on various forums, etsy, folksy etc.. but my trouble is that unless I actually have the camera there and try it out (which obviously I never do) I just never remember what I'm supposed to be doing (and to be honest, just can't be bothered to play around - too much to do, and too little time). But I know photos are one of the most important things, and so I decided to take some time to figure them out.

I know the key for good lighting is natural sunlight, and that has been in short supply until recently, so now that the sun is actually out I thought I'd have a play with my camera and show you what I came up with. The theory is if I write it down on my blog, I can refer back when I (inevitably) forget what I did!

A tutorial I would really recommend is Boo's Digital Photography Tutorial - especially useful for me as Boo also makes jewellery.

The key issue I have is the light, and so that's what I focused on. I want a really bright pic, BUT (and it's a big but) not overexposed which changes the colour of the gemstones, and makes the silver look white. When you're buying online you really need to have as accurate a picture of the item as possible.

BACKGROUND

I tend to use a plain white background because I like a simple, clean look. BUT I've heard that the best colour background to use is grey. Honestly, I've been looking around for a nice simple grey "thing" to take pics on for weeks now, and can't find anything that I like - where do you get a lump of slate? I tried the DIY stores, but nothing quite right. So I'm sticking to white for the time being.

LIGHTBOX

I thought it was about time I actually used the DIY lightbox I made ages ago (last time the sun was out!) I know natural sunshine is the best thing for photos, and to be honest I love the shadows that it makes, but it can make it difficult to see the item properly. I must admit it hadn't occured to me they were a problem until I read discussions in the forums on it. So I did a comparison....

This picture above is just in sunlight without a lightbox..

And this one is in the lightbox. (Obviously I'd crop it etc.. for the real version, but this is just to show the light!).

Hmmm..... I think I know which one I prefer.  Doing this comparison and seeing things side by side is really useful for me.

I'm really glad I made the lightbox now! And it really didn't take long to do. I also had a old cereal box and put crinkled up silver foil on it to reflect light back onto the earrings. Takes seconds to do, and I think it really helped.

Final trick - on this second picture I also changed the exposure setting (so easy to do - I moved it up to +1) Makes a huge difference!

The next experiment was to play with the White Balance.... pictures of this to come in part 2.