Duh!

Oh my! But I've been struggling with getting clear images of my bead work. Sometimes my pictures come out well, but more often than not, they come out like this:

And I couldn't figure out what the issue was. I'd shoot in natural light inside my condo in the day.

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I'd shoot inside of my condo with artificial lighting at night.

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I'd shoot outside during the day.

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I tried a lightbox and the results were still awful.

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I mounted my camera on a tripod so that it wasn't shaking when I pushed the button.

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I tried close up shots, far away shots, cropped shots. Every kind of shot that I could imagine.

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But amongst all the attempts, I was getting occasional clear pictures of my work.

What was the issue? My camera is a point-and-shoot model; I wasn't varying the settings much, if at all.


Beads are beads, and lighting is lighting. The tripod, admittedly, helped, but not enough to account for this much difference.
So I went to sleep on it last night. Thought the issue through really hard. And the solution came to me.

Maybe not all colors are meant to be photographed against black. Maybe my background was messing up the image, which is reflective under the best of circumstances. So I brought out some of the colored paper that I used to shoot against when I was still making things difficult for myself, laid it out on my dining room table with the blinds behind me closed, but the "other" blinds in the living room open. Mid-to-late morning, so my condo was sunny and bright even with the one blind closed. And shot the same earrings again.

Duh.

(All work pictured here is now available in my on-line Etsy Jewelry Store.)