I am a HUGE fan of people who can draw and paint, and come up with a final piece that doesn’t look like a preschooler made it. I’m not one of those people. (My husband is, though, and you can check out some of his past work at Southwestern Voodoo.) Having also spent many, many [...]

I’ve been struggling with my photos lately – granted, they’ve improved drastically from the days when I used a scanner to “photograph” my work, but I’m having a hard time getting to the next level from where I am. So I was happy to find two really informative articles about photography, geared toward people who [...]

While searching for GIMP info online, I found a great site called Texture Well, which is basically a bunch of high-resolution jpg images of various textures, that are free to download and use. There doesn’t seem to be any catch – they are licensed under a creative commons attribution license, so all you have to [...]

Yesterday’s photo is of a little cluster of blossoms on a plum tree. The tree itself looks a lot like a blossoming cherry tree to me – very pretty – so I’m glad I got some pictures while it’s in full bloom. It was a really bright day though, and the color ended up looking [...]

The first thing you need to do is make sure you are using the latest version of Picasa, which at the moment is version 3. It is available for both Mac and PC (I use both, depending on if I’m home or at my part time job). It is free, you just download and install [...]

I recently heard someone say they weren’t all that impressed with picasa, because photoshop can do everything picasa can do, and more. This is completely true – picasa only does a fraction of what you could do with photoshop or paint shop pro – so why do I like it so much? It’s easy! It [...]

that’s all. just discovered it – it’s a free photo editing program – and I love it.

It often seems like I spend more time taking photos of jewelry than actually making jewelry. While this may not be true, running a business online does mean shooting, and reshooting, a lot of pictures. I’ve gotten better at taking photos, but sometimes after a shoot, I’m left with nothing more eye-catching than this: These [...]

As I was editing some jewelry photos I took outside, I noticed that the blurry backgrounds sometimes look like watercolor or impressionist-style paintings. Here’s an example: I added the frame using paint shop pro, to emphasize how it looks like it could be artwork. I love it when I discover something beautiful by accident like [...]

Bonhomie Jewelry recently asked me for tips on getting great jewelry photos. I was surprised, because some of my jewelry photos look like this: It’s not bad – you get the general idea of what the pendant looks like, and you can see that there’s a dark colored round bead, but what you can’t see [...]