Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Photography

I take my own photographs of my finished pieces for my website and many other applications and I do a reasonable job, but I'd like to do better. Several months ago I bought Photographing Arts, Crafts & Collectibles, a Lark Book written by Steve Meltzer.




It was pointed out that the book can be rather an overwhelming amount of information for a beginner and while this may be true, I think taking it slow and absorbing the pertinent information a chapter at a time would benefit anyone interested in improving their skills.

Lately I've been wanting to purchase a new camera, and light studio. I thought perhaps a digital SLR but upon further reading I think I do not need the ability to change lenses. My camera will be for taking close ups of my jewelry. For travel I prefer a lightweight point and shoot which gives me results that are excellent for my needs.

The chapters are well segmented so I can learn about camera settings such as white balance, exposure, and image quality, then move onto lighting, special considerations for the type of product I am photographing and then the digital darkroom for enhancing digital image files.

Each time I revisit this book I learn something new to try out, and I may be researching cameras soon.

2 comments:

Beverly Ash Gilbert said...

Marsha, thank you for this - I definitely need pointers on how to shoot jewelry. So much easier to capture the colors of a flower outside, than all of the subtle colors of beads. I will grab a copy!

Dolphina said...

Thanks for the suggestion... I got a beautiful camera 2 years ago and I just love it! Not only it does take excellent general pictures but there's a macro and super macro features, which are essential for small objects. It's a Canon S5is which I love, affordable and fairly easy to use... I'm in the same boat... I take pics of my own stuff and I was looking for a good book.
Thanks for the tip ;o)