Monday 26 April 2010

How hard can it be to take a photo? - part 2 (I think)

OK, so Spring seems to have sprung and the sun is making an occasional appearance here, despite Icelandic volcanoes erupting and sending clouds of ash this way.

I've tried all sorts of indoor photography options, some more successful than others, and the suggestion of a day of sunshine at the weekend was enough to send me outdoors armed with my boxes of jewellery, assorted pieces of fabric and my camera to look for photographic inspiration.  My neighbour has some lovely stones she has brought back from her walking and climbing trips all over Scotland so I asked if I could borrow some of them to use as jewellery stands and backgrounds to enhance the appearance oof my creations.  She said "help yourself", so I did, to her entire garden. LOL!  Well she has some interesting plant life in her garden too.

Here are some of my previous, indoor photos for comparison:

 
 

I had tried all sorts of clever ideas that looked really good in magasine articles but in my hands, with my camera skills many of them were just awful.  So with the help of my neighbour's Corkscrew Hazel tree and some pieces of granite and quartz look-alikes I tried again.  Unfortunately, my idea of using a big aperture to get a fuzzy background backfired on me with the paleness of the quartz as it over-exposed the shots in the meagre amount of Scottish sunshine (!!!) and bleached everything out.  350 photos later I did manage to get some that I liked:

Corkscrew hazel:


Sadly, the following day it just rained and rained so I couldn't play with any other backgrounds. What do you think? Is it an improvement?  It doesn't work for everything and my well laid plans definitely went agley for the pale backgrounds.

3 comments:

  1. I need to get me a curly tree or similar for outdoor photo taking. Our back garden isn't very pretty.

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  2. If you use a big apperture setting it will blur the background, so it doesn't need to be pretty exactly, just a pleasant colour.

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  3. WOW!
    So beautiful post i love it.

    ReplyDelete