craftgrrl | Taking pictures of the pretties

I've been a crafter all of my life. (Heck, for a while I thought of myself as an artist) But recently, I've really wanted to start getting stuff out there for people to appreciate.

I've had a few thoughts about photography, but nothing novel. I really want more information about the art of taking pictures of jewelry and little things. Because, bleh, my efforts are only so successful.

(this evening, I want to take the time to go trough the archives here and see how many of you all have posted usefulness)
Can it really be done successfully with a plain old digi-cam?
What are the best ways to focus attention? Is it essential to get the entire piece? Or can you focus on details and let the imagination fill in the rest?

Anyway, what are people's goals with their stuff? I love making things for myself and family, but only so much is useful to me and I just keep making things.
What do you do when your gift list is saturated, your house is full, and your friends are tired of being shown that one new thing?

twoseamfastball replied:
When you say 'plain old digi cam', what are you talking about? I mean, I shoot exclusively digital-- one of my cams is a dSLR, one is not. I've been able to get good close-up shots with both. Light really makes a huge difference. If you really can't get good artificial light, daylight is almost ALWAYS better than mediocre indoor lighting rigs.

For instance, this shot, which from the same shoot as a bunch of photos purchased by an orchid magazine, was photographed with only natural daylight (coming in through a couple windows to the left) on a plain black bed sheet. The sheet looks good because I'm using f/1.4-- a wiiiiide open f-stop, which gives you a really shallow depth of field, which means that the background will blur and imperfections can be hidden.

A good way to get the same effect without a lens that can go that wide is to SEPARATE your object and your background. So if you're shooting a pendant on a black background, you set up your background, and dangle your pendant like 6 inches IN FRONT of the backdrop. Then you light the pendant (keeping as much light as you can off the backdrop), and focus your camera on the pendant. If you're using a macro setting, the background should fall away into blur. You can do that with a point-and-shoot cam, you don't need dSLR, but the results can look really pro.

twocheeseplease replied:
I take all my photos with a simple point-and-shoot automatic Nikon digi-cam. It's about 5 years old or so - about 3-ish mega pixels. Sure, if I could afford justify a posh SLR camera I'd definitely go for it but I don't think having a regular digital camera handicaps you THAT much.

The most important thing I've found is lighting, background, and cropping. Depending on the piece you can go two ways. You can set it up in a suitable environment - this seems to work well for plushies. For accessories or whatnot, you really can't go past a simple white background. It really makes your images POP! You don't want to distract from the gorgeousness that is your item by having a busy background.

Make friends with the macro setting on your camera (if what you make are small things). If you want, you can go buy a table-top tripod to keep your camera steady and get even sharper results. If you don't have a tripod (and I don't at the moment), a good tip I use is to slowly exhale as you press the shutter and that gets rid of a lot of tremours. Take lots of photos! LOTS! You don't have to pay to have them developed so just go nuts and then just pick the best one out.

Get yourself some photo editing software. I have Photoshop but it's expensive (thank you graphic designer father!). Gimp is the same, but free! Everyone loves free :D

Crop your photos so that your item is featured and centred.

For lighting - natural light works best. However, if you live in a place that's often overcast or you can't take photos during the day, most digi-cams have settings to automatically adjust for whatever kind of light you're using. It should be under White Balance on your camera's menu, and depending on your light source you can set it to cloudy/overcast, tungsten/"regular light bulbs", incandescent/fluroescent, etc and it'll adjust for you. Have a flick through - if you have your camera set on Tungsten and the lightning is from fluro bulbs you'll be able to tell on the preview screen how blue the image will turn out - yuck! So just change the white balance setting.

On my journal I have a simple tute to make yourself a lightbox for more controlled environment shoots. This way you can also change the background too if you want - just put in a different piece of card or material behind your piece. I also talk about lighting and about using lamps to get light where you want, and daylight bulbs.

As for goals.... One day I'd love to be super successful like Wee Wonderfuls (I think EVERYONE who crafts and has the internet knows about Hillary!). Whether or not I'm prepared to put in the amount of effort needed to get there... I'm not sure yet. I'm sure a lot comes down to luck and talent, too. However at the moment I'm still at the stage where everyone's getting "just because" presents, and I'm just happy if someone wants to buy something I've made.

However, I really don't think you have to shell out $2000 on photographic equipment or a professional photographer to get professional shots. Sure, you can get BETTER shots with the expensive equipment or a pro doing it for you, but a lot of the pictures I've seen of things that get snapped up instantly are just point-and-shoot jobs like you and I have. Just fiddle around, take LOTS of photos and practice!

(Another thing you might like to consider is keeping your background consistant. If you look Etsy, you'll see a lot of items have exactly the same background or themed background or style no matter the item - you click on them and you find that all of those items are from the same seller. What a fantastic way to brand your stuff even just in thumbnail previews!)

jadedwishes replied:
If you want to get real serious about it, i would suggest upgrading your camera and it doesn't hurt to get a photo imaging software like photoshop. If you don't have the funds for that go with Gimp. Lighting is key to any photography, so you want to make sure you photograph under the right lighting, even making your own lightbox. I think there is a book out there about how to do this, but I don't know the name.

and

tooaquarius replied:
phew... there's a tough one.

Like you I sell on Etsy and at craft fairs. I also have my own site and I've sold to a few physical shops / wholesaled to other artists. I make stuff whether I am paid for it or not and my family runs when I bring out the latest stack of beads.

I guess the first step is to decide what you want to accomplish. Do you want to sell enough to recoup your (reasonable) hobby expenses? Do you want to make real income (part time or otherwise) at this?

If the first is fine, then yes a run of the mill plain ol digital cam is fine. I use either a 2mp or a 3.2mp (8 and 6 years old, respectively) camera for my web store work and while the photos are not perfect, I have sold well online. You would do best to then learn how to macro, brighten, contrast, sharpen and crop super duper well and work on other promotional / branding things. On Etsy the pics that get the most attention are the bright clear ones with nice, interesting closeups, the ones with those perfect white knockout backgrounds or the well posed, sorta closeup ones with good props (hardest to do).

If the second, then all of the above plus a better camera (or access to a good photographer) to take jury pics, pics to be sent into the reader sections of magazines on your medium, entered into contests and act as posters at your high end show booths. This is what I am working towards slowly but surely.

I am organizing my work and efforts to represent a limited set of lines by trimming and improving my overall presentation.