Monday, September 29, 2008

The Joys of Photography

It takes a lot of work to photograph all those Jewelry Making Ideas I have for you at eebeads.com, but it's a lot of fun too. Years ago we used to just lay the jewelry on a scanner and scan away, but not anymore. Scanning is a very easy (not to mention inexpensive) way to get pictures of your jewelry up on the web, but I was picky and wanted more.

After a lot of investment in time and money Allen (hubby and co-owner of eebeads.com) figured it all out and what you see today is the results. It also didn't hurt that my brother is a professional photographer. He lives 800 miles away, but through the miracle of email, he helped us get where we are today. The only problem is little Ms. Picky (aka me) wanted more than Allen had the patience for. "Can you move it a little to the left? Can you try it at a different angle? Could you move the light to the right?" He's patient, but there's only so much he can take. So I took over and we've all been happy now. Yep, I take all the photos that appear on our site. I know a lot of our competitors have multiple photographers, but we can't afford that and I'd probably be miserable anyway.

The trickiest things have always been the earrings. We tried laying them down flat and shooting from above, but some earrings just wouldn't cooperate. A perfect example is the angel breast cancer awareness ribbon earrings that I'm putting up this week. As you can see, there's no way those little angels and ribbons would have laid flat properly. In came Allen. He made the little "stage" you see above to shoot earrings and I think it's just perfect! Let me know what you think by sending me an email to blog@eebeads.com or leave a comment below.

5 comments:

  1. That's very clever!!! The photo came out great ... and I think the earrings will be a hit!

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  2. I think this is a great way to photograph earrings. But in my opinion you need different color backgrounds for different color beads. The pink flower skirt and the white or off white head bead do not show up very well against the white background. I don't know if a light blue background would change the color of the pink skirt bead, but if it doesn't, then the earrings would show up better against blue or some other color. You do a very good job of photographing the beads and jewelry on the site.

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  3. I love this! I've been struggling to figure out how to best photograph my own earrings that I have up for sale on my livejournal site, and seeing this just solved the stabilization problems I'd been having with my own designs.

    I agree with what "sh" said about the different backgrounds. I use scrapbook paper for my own backgrounds. I found a pack of 250 on clearance last year and they are perfect. There's a color or pattern that works pretty well for just about everything.

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  4. Looks great! I think I'll make my husband build one of those for me; I always hate photographing my pieces from the top too but I don't have a lot of other choices.

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  5. It's a good clear shot, but maybe a little light. if you put it into Photoshop and darken it a little, the beads would probably show up better, that is, of coures if you have Photoshop! I like the hanging idea for getting all the parts to show up right.

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