A NEW CAMERA! We’ve finally got ourselves a nice SLR and it’s making photographing our pieces a million times easier, not to mention faster. My old process was to position the piece, put the camera on Macro setting, take a picture, navigate to the exposure menu, adjust the setting, take another picture, navigate to the menu, adjust the setting… You get the idea. Shots were rarely consistant because the autofocus, auto white balance, etc. etc. would throw everything off if I moved. And we’ve all had the thing happen where a shot looks great on the preview screen, but it’s too dark or too bright once you actually get it off the card. The only reason my old photos look so nice is because I would have to spend about ten minutes on each one in Photoshop making them look anything close to the actual color of the piece.

But now… Oh, it’s awesome! I can set everything manually and what I shoot is what I get! So now you guys can see what things really look like without me having to tweak everything afterwards. Now I just crop and resize them so they’re a format Etsy likes, and I’m done! I was seriously avoiding taking photos for a while because the whole process was just incredibly frustrating and took way longer than it needed to.

This camera has a serious learning curve attached to it, but I’ve been playing around with it for two weeks and I think I’ve got it. I actually managed to remember a lot of what I learned way back in high school while I was haunting those photography classes. I was on an independent art and language study program that I made up for myself, and Photography was a small enough class I could work on my animations without being in anyone’s way. Some of what Mrs. Lowe taught them must have sunk in while I was photographing cels!

But do you want to see a sample? Here’s a comparison:

Old Image of the Necklace

And here’s that necklace again!

Much Better - SLR to the Rescue!

Oh yeah – I love this camera. Expect all the things that have been piling up on my workbench (like this necklace) to start popping up in our Etsy Shop now that photographing them is easier. I’m also re-shooting things as I go through my inventory for the impending show on the 10th, so if an item that you’ve added to your Favorites on Etsy suddenly looks different, it’s because it’s been re-shot.

But it’s late, and I’ve got to get to bed. Night!