Collage

Some time ago my friend Protege suggested making a collage of my jewelry photographs to turn into a poster, and I really loved the suggestion. So I decided to play today to see what possibilities I can come up with. Here's one idea. I'm thinking this would also make for great postcards.

On real people

My friend Camille posted a couple of pictures on Hazel Designs' Facebook page from her wedding that showcase the jewelry she commissioned from me. Here is one of her wearing the Anne bracelet that was her "something blue" during the dancing of the horah (the other arm is her hubby Jeremy). Isn't it pretty?

And here is one of her bridesmaids wearing the smoky quartz bracelet and earrings!

Check out the rest of my live models on Hazel Designs' Facebook page, including Camryn wearing the Camryn. And a huge thanks to Camille for giving me permission to post her lovely photos.

Film noir

I took new pictures of the hand-stamped metal disc LOVE earrings listed on Etsy a few months back. Don't they look kind of film noir?

Smoky quartz earrings

So I really wanted to name something after my cousin Ryan, who is Highmaintenancemom's little bro, but I couldn't come up with a good girl's derivative of his name. I decided to call this piece "Camryn" after his girlfriend instead. This one's for you, too, Ryan!

She is made of these gorgeous smoky quartz faceted briolettes, hand wrapped in gold-filled wire. I then added gold-filled jump rings to dress her up and put the whole lot on vermeil earwires.

More pictures and details of Camryn are available at the shop! (Also notice the debut of the French poetry book from Mr Hazel in these pictures.)

And in the good news front, Margaret, Bella and another pair of Ahila have all sold! Thanks, Lisa!

Yesterday also saw the arrival of the dress form that I had ordered. I've been looking for one of these for a while now for displaying and photographing my necklaces because I realized it's hard to gauge the length and the overall look just by using those busts. But with the dress forms, they are in proportion to a real person so you can see where the necklaces will hang in relation to the neck and bust. My sister also was the one to tell me that they are called "dress forms" and not mannequins (which are different things), so I knew what to search for.

The one I bought is gorgeous, has a wooden base and neck, and can be extended up to 6'. It also has a really huge pair of boobs. The one I originally wanted to get didn't have nearly as big a pair, but Mr Hazel thought this one was better because it has, according to him, "more of a form." Yes, we all know what he meant by that!

Also, I think this makes for nice decoration. Gives a room that chic, "Paris atelier" sort of a look.


I've retaken shots of some of the necklaces and will continue doing so until all of the existing necklaces have this picture. Here are some I've put up already:



I kind of feel like I ought to put some clothes on her.

Revamped!

I revamped my store by taking brand new photographs, some with new backgrounds. I dug up my violin sheet music (thank you, Bach!) and bought five different kinds of scrapbook paper (I had to stop myself at five because they were all so pretty that I couldn't decide which ones to get.)

I'm really loving this new camera, especially the super macro feature. After a rough start I think I've got it under control, and if you compare my first few photographs from when I first started this blog, to now, I think you will see a vast, huge improvement on my photography skills.

I decided that for the "front page" pictures I would do an extreme close up of the piece, sometimes not even showing the whole thing. I found that when I browsed on Etsy, the pieces that were extremely close up were the ones I would click on because I couldn't tell what the whole piece looked like. I was intrigued. So I hope this happens with these new photographs as well.

Here are are some of my favorite shots.








I was a busy bee today and there are lots of new goodies going up in the shop within the next few days. I'll give you a hint: EARRINGS!

Etsy find of the day

The Etsy site is literally a treasure trove of cool, unusual, and unique things and it's so easy to get suckered in for hours looking through them. I've hearted about fifty shops on here - which reminds me, thank you so much to bannerbee and xenya for hearting my shop! That was much appreciated. I get so giddy when someone hearts my shop - I now have a total of five hearts! Yippee!

Recently I joined the Etsy CREST street team, both to expose my shop as much as possible to the Etsy world and to meet my fellow Etsy sellers.

One of the members of Etsy CREST, xenya, has a shop of photographic works called Forgotten Beauty, and I was blown away by some of the photographs on here. I love her concept of taking pictures of forgotten things and places, which sort of has that flea market, antique-y, distressed vibe that I love so much. Her work is just gorgeous.

I found two photographs that I'm thinking of buying and I'm just trying to decide between them:

I think these would look amazing with a wide white mat and a black frame. They also come in different sizes. What the heck, maybe I'll just get them both.

Almost back to business

I heard back from the camera shop and they told me that it was going to cost upwards of $100 to repair the broken camera (FWIW, it was a Canon PowerShot - in case you want to avoid this product). We decided it was more cost effective to get a whole new camera, especially since we still had some leftover Best Buy gift cards. The final cost came to a little more than what we would have paid to repair the old camera.

The one we chose is a super slim Olympus FE-340, 8 megapixels, and the best part about it is that it has a super macro mode. I always take pictures of my jewelry in macro mode, especially the close ups, so I'm excited to see how much better they will come out in super macro mode.

It also has other neat features such as face detection, digital image stabilization (another great feature when taking pictures of my products since I don't have a tripod and blurry images would often plague me because of this), a camcorder, and this thing called a "smile shot," where the camera detects a smile on the subject's face and automatically fires off three consecutive shots without you having to do anything. The salesgirl said this is especially great for taking pictures of babies and kids.

My sister's 5-year old digital camera is also an Olympus and it's still working great, so I have high hopes for this new one. After the battery finishes charging I will finally be able to photograph my new designs from the past two weeks and put them up for sale.

I can't wait to show you!

Technical woes

Our internet connection is still as bad as ever, and now they think it might be a circuit problem, in which case it probably won't be fixed for a while. They're sending someone out to take a look. In the meantime, it's taking me almost an hour to write this post! Very frustrating.

To add to my technical difficulties, my camera decided to conk out. There I was all excited because the sun finally decided to make an appearance and I set everything up to take more pictures as quickly as I could, trying to catch the light, when I realized the camera was out of batteries.

So I raced to the drugstore to pick some up, raced back home, and was just about to get started a second time, when the screen on the camera went black - and black it stayed, no matter what buttons I pushed.

Understandably, all the pictures it took then turned out to be all black too.

I'm going to take it to a camera shop to see if it can be fixed, but I suppose it wouldn't be the end of the world to shell out money for a new camera since it would be tax deductible. I'm hoping I won't have to just yet though.

Very frustrating!

In the meantime, I'm staying productive by continuing to work on more pieces, and then there's always Britney to entertain all of us.

Featured countdown necklace of the day: Crysophrase and silver

Ten days left! I am so excited!


I had a long photo shoot with all the finished pieces because some of the earlier pictures I took didn't come out right. After experimenting a whole lot, I found that the optimal place to photograph these is on my kitchen table - we have French doors directly next to it that is a great source of afternoon light. Plus, the color of the walls is a nice backdrop.

So today I took a bunch of pictures that I want to use on Etsy, but halfway through, the sun decided to say goodbye. I had to cut things short and try again another day.



Today's featured necklace is a new one, and it photographed fairly well. It is made of my favorite stone, crysophrase, with a single pearl hanging off a silver linked chain. This chain is such a great find - I really love this shade of silver.

And here is a close up of the toggle clasp.

Photographing jewelry

One thing you might have noticed while perusing the images of the jewelry on these pages is that it's very tricky to capture them in pictures.

I have to make sure I have enough light, that the angle shows the necklace off at optimum, and the background is aesthetically pleasing but not distracting.

I want to be able to present my work at its best. I try to capture the colors and textures, the beauty of my shells and stones and beads - but it is a very challenging task.

In the coming months I will be doing a lot of experimenting with photography and exploring the best ways to capture these pieces digitally, and hopefully improve the quality of my pictures. Wish me luck!