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Old 2006-11-14, 2:47pm
!ngridh !ngridh is offline
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Join Date: Dec 13, 2005
Location: Western Washington
Posts: 1,192
Default photography and what works for me

I have been spending most of my time selling beads on ebay ....not mine.
Even the suppliers I buy from are envious of my pictures so IF you are interested...
here is a before and after photo of some iris beads.


http://www.artwearable.com/images/PHOTOSETUP.jpg

I have a room facing east and south that gets good lighting. This is western Washington so not direct sun but plenty of light.

I use a mavica CD500. (this camera will make seroius adjustments if you are shooting in a dark spot) So I put the beads on a white sheet of paper. (that makes adjustment easier because you know what the background should look like.) (I have an old version of paintshop pro 7 and I am used to it and love it)

So the top is the photo naked. I put them on a table away from the window that gets no direct light at all. If the day gets late it can be quite dark there but my camera sees that it is too dark and will put up the hot orange/red grill pattern in my view finder and when it does that it lightens the background of the image to white(or close to it.)

Today I shot these and there was plenty of indirect light. YOu could read in that spot easily.

After taking the shot I go to paintshop and The first adjustment I make is hue and I lighten the photo by +14 to +16 this does not make a big difference. Then I go to brightness contrast and hit it up until the background is white. It is very important to not just take up brightness, take up the contrast too. For example if I take brightness to 45 I will take the contrast to 42 or 43. I then use "clarify" +1 or 2 that makes it highlight a little more obvious... then finally I go to sharpen and sharpen +1.

and I am done. Shooting in direct sunlight never works for me and even indirect where the light is close to the items. I have to shoot in a dark corner.
My back is toward the light and the beads are in front of me...

[url="http://artwearable.com/images/PHOTOSETUP.jpg"[/URL]

so nothing special but I feel like I can get good pictures without anything special. I think the key is having uniform light on the subject while not necessaryly much light.
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Never lose your sense of awe.

Beads galore at my ebay store!

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Minor with a REGALIA heavenly!

Last edited by !ngridh; 2008-04-06 at 1:37pm. Reason: LINKS ARE OUTDATED
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