I'm calling it ready, cause otherwise I'll revise it forever...

[winterthunder]

Announcing the Written Insight Etsy Shop! Natural jewelry and wearable literature, a line of pendants and earrings incorporating the best parts of an afternoon spent under a tree with a book.

Please check it out and let me know what you think!

Comments

[djinnj]

Very nice pieces

[djinnj]

Oh, and if you haven't already. Turn on your Google Analytics!

[winterthunder]

Thanks!

Tags and featured items, those are definitely areas I put in the "look at this later" pile. For the photos, though... I don't know, the ones there are ten times better than my first attempt. I borrowed a professional lightbox setup for my first round of photos, and the pendant photos you mentioned were the only ones worth keeping. And even then, they're really dark. I can't up the exposure in gimp any more without starting to bleach out the colors. Part of me thinks it might be my camera, because it's several years old and I can't adjust white balance and exposure while in the macro setting. So in order to get photos that are focused I have to rely on the automatic settings in the pre-set macro feature. I'm inclined to ask one of my photographer friends to help me figure out the best way to work with the limitations of my camera for the next round of inventory and then go back and take new pictures of the existing inventory when I can later.

Feedback, right.

[djinnj]

More light is the easiest and at the same time most frustrating fix for pictures. Easy because it doesn't require buying anything or anything fancy, but frustrating because one is at the whim of the weather.

Bright but indirect natural light is miraculous, even when using a light box. Taking the whole box outside can work. I don't even use a light box, as I find I get better pictures on a bright day in the shadow of the house. The ambient light is enough, and if I avoid taking pictures too early or too late in the day, the color temperature is balanced already. But things like reds, purples, and greens just don't like photographing. I always have trouble with those.

How good are you at Gimp? I'm still learning the ins and outs, and it can be really brilliant or really frustrating. One of the things I'm getting better at is judging when a picture is fixable in Gimp and when I really need to take a new one!

[winterthunder]

Hmm, it never occurred to me to take the lightbox outside. The outdoor photos were taken on a sunny day with an umbrella between my camera and the sun. It took more than three hours to get through all the items, though, so there's a real light difference between the first photos and the last, particularly with the earrings.

Almost a complete Gimp newbie. Is there a good reference site out there? I keep getting different hits whenever I search on basic how-tos.

[djinnj]

Sunlight is the *best*, but direct sunlight is often too harsh to really show details. That's where the light box or a good diffuse shadow works really well