Sunday, March 25, 2012

Fun With Photography!

I bought my new awesome DSLR camera last spring and have been trying to learn more and more about photography and lighting.  I've come to the conclusion that I love indirect natural daylight the best.  I've learned somewhat how to manage to work with indoor lighting, but it's harder and much more time-consuming in the final photo editing process.  And the color is just far superior and much more true with natural daylight. 

My latest experiment this morning is my setup shown below.


First, this table is located right next to a huge patio door.  The morning sun shines brightly through this side of the house.  I want to avoid harsh shadows around my jewelry, so I placed a large piece of wax paper on the window to filter the light, but still keep the optimum color temperature.  

I then covered a bi-fold cardboard cutout with aluminum foil to put on the opposite side of the window to reflect light back onto the jewelry.  

I have a few pieces of scrapbook paper with neutral themes to use as a background to lay my jewelry on.  

Props can be really cool if done nicely... I don't like too much stuff in the background, but I loved this decorative wood frame and the washed look on this wood box.  They have turned out to be super-cool props and the wood box is my favorite yet!!

Here are some of the results from my photo shoot.

   

What do you think??

Sunday, March 18, 2012

New Custom Bracelet

I recently had a request to design and make a custom bracelet for a new mother.  Mom just had a son and Grandma wanted to make a bracelet with his name and Mom and Baby's birthstones in the bracelet.  She wanted crystals and silver, chose a couple name bracelet designs that I had made in the past that she liked and I got to work making her a custom bracelet.  This was the preliminary design that I showed Grandma. Baby's birthstone was amethyst (February) and Mom's birthstone was pink tourmaline (October).


She loved it!  So I got to work making the final design, adjusted a couple little things here and there to make it the perfect length and sent the finished product out. 

Sunday, March 11, 2012

My Mess...

Over the months and years as I make jewelry and make messes at my workstation, things scatter around my studio, leftover beads and material get left out and it eventually adds up.  Probably about 2 years ago, I gathered up all this stuff, in my attempt at de-cluttering, and put it all in a plastic container.  I was trying to put it all in one place to more easily go through it.  But the plastic container got shoved out of the way on a shelf and forgotten.  

For the past week, I have been completely rearranging 2 rooms in the house to get ready for the new baby, due June 4.  My studio (the extra bedroom) is now turning into the baby's room and I am consolidating and packing half the office so I can move my studio into a section of that room.  So I stumbled across this tucked away plastic container.  

I've at least opened it to see what's in it.  Some beads, some finished jewelry pieces, some stuff that needs re-design or repair, some practice wirework stuff... and it's now my goal to finally get this mess taken care of!  I will try very hard to be more disciplined in the future and put stuff back where it belongs right away, so I don't have to deal with this again!!