Having also spent many, many hours working on becoming a better photographer (and a long way to go to get where I’d like to be), I’m also in awe every time I see a really gorgeous photo. It doesn’t even matter to me if it’s been digitally altered or not – the skills some people have with photoshop and similar programs is an art in itself!

So, for my final gift guide, I’d just like to point out a few talented artists and photographers I’ve become a fan of since I got involved with selling on etsy. If your taste differs from mine, all you have to do is browse the art and photography categories there to find something that would be perfect to hang in your living room.

Photo by Lorissa Longfellow

Lorissa Longfellow takes beautiful photographs and has spent a lot of time on Route 66 – in her shop you can find images of flowers as well as Americana from her travels, and more.

Abstract by Bobbi Chukran

Bobi Chukran is a multi-talented artist who paints and does hand-pulled linocut prints. I own a couple of her small abstract pieces and I love them.

Photo from Designs by Victoria

Victoria, jewelry maker behind Designs by Victoria, makes some beautiful digitally altered photos.

Photo from Allie Art for Children

Allie of Allie Art for Children takes fantastic photos, and I think the way she alters them is genius.

Look what Marisa Hopkins of Elegant Snobbery does with colored pencils. Her shop is closed for the moment, but you can see lots of her artwork on her blog. I had no idea colored pencils could be blended, and her prints make perfect decorations for a nursery or kid room – I should know, being the proud owner of two of her sock monkey prints!

Those are just a few of my favorites. Here’s a little list of links to some other great etsy shops if you feel like more browsing….

Apple Loves Orange
McIsaac Art
The Dreamy Giraffe
Echos Art
Jennifer Dennis Potter
Natural Artist
Madrin Photography

Know another great etsy artist I should check out? Tell me in the comments, I’ll update the list!

So I was happy to find two really informative articles about photography, geared toward people who are just learning how to use the manual settings on their cameras (that would be me!)

The first one is a basic overview of camera terminology, as well as how cameras work, so that you have an understanding of what everything means. The second article gets into more details on how to use all these settings (now that you know what the mean & what they are intended to do) so that you can take better pictures.

I definitely recommend checking these out if you are interested in learning more about what your digital camera is capable of.

If you love texture as much as I do, it’s definitely worth browsing. There are leaves, bubbles, wood, metal, and much more. A lot of them could be very cool backgrounds for all kinds of artwork and graphic design.

I was inspired to go out and take some of my own texture photos. This is something I’ve done before (you can see a few examples on flickr in my rusty things album) but never with the thought in my head that I might use them as part of another piece of art, rather than being the piece themselves. I know, slight distinction, but it does change how I frame a shot. (And no, I’m not a professional by any means, and don’t even have any photography training – I just really like taking photos and want to keep getting better at it – it’s fun, particularly now that I’m learning how to edit my photos.)

Anyway, here are a couple examples from my most recent photo shoot. I didn’t get to travel to any of the exotic locations seen in texture well; in fact I didn’t go any further than my own back yard, but I think I got some interesting stuff.

Steel

brush

I decided to add a texture set on flickr, and uploaded some altered pictures of a piece of rusting metal. If you like them, you can feel free to use them – I put a creative commons attribution license on them, so all you have to do is give me credit by linking to this blog post or the set on flickr.

It was a really bright day though, and the color ended up looking “blah” so I had to edit the photo a little to bring out the great colors of the sky, leaves, and centers of the flowers. Using Picasa, I sharpened the photo a bit, and then increased the saturation a little, and I think it looks pretty good now.

Here is the same photo, but in sepia:

Blossoms - Sepia

Since I’ve been taking so many non-jewelry photos lately, and having such a great time working on my photography, I’ve decided to devote a blog to just my pictures. I’ve had the domain for a long time, and was using it to test new wordpress features so I wouldn’t break this blog every time I wanted to change something, but I figured it could be put to much better use.

Visit Tell Me Thursday

Then, you have to open the program and wait for a while. The first time you use it, it searches your computer for all photo files and makes a list of photo folders that looks like a left-hand sidebar. So grab a cup of coffee and come back later.

In the main screen, you will see a bunch of thumbnails. You can scroll up or down, or click on one of the folders in the sidebar, to navigate through the thumbnail images. Or, double-click on a thumbnail to edit it.

Once you’ve opened an image to edit it, you’ll notice that the left sidebar has changed. Instead of picture folders, now you will see three tabs: Basic Fixes, Tuning, and Effects. Click on a tab to see the things you can do to your photo within that tab’s menu.

But I’ll just go ahead and tell you.

Under Basic Fixes, you can crop, straighten, fix red-eye, try “I’m feeling lucky”, auto adjust contrast, auto adjust color, retouch, add text, or increase the fill light (basically, lighten the photo).

Under Tuning, you can adjust the fill light, highlights, shadows, color temperature, or, my favorite, use the neutral color picker (more about this later).

Under effects, you can do all kinds of fun things to your photo – sharpen, turn it sepia or black and white, warmify, add a film grain, tint, change the saturation, make it appear in soft focus, give it a glow, filtered black and white and focal black and white (just fancy ways to make your picture mostly black and white), or add a graduated tint.

At the bottom of the screen are some little buttons – you can rotate the photo, add tags, “star” the photo, zoom in (or out), and view the camera info. Larger buttons let you upload a photo to your online album, email a photo, print a photo, export (great if you want to resize for use online), post it to a blog, make a photo collage, or make a movie.

At the top of the edit screen, you can click to the next or previous photo, scroll through your photos, play a slideshow, or go back to your photo library (the main screen when you open the program).

Under the left sidebar, you’ll see a little thumbnail of the photo you are working on, and three little buttons – these stay when you go back to the main menu (by clicking “return to library” at the top of the screen) and allow you to select multiple photos (or none) for batch operations or to create a new album.

Now that you are back to your photo library, look at the top of your screen. There are some buttons – you can create an album, change the way your picture folders are displayed, choose to view only starred photos, only photos of faces, or only movies.

Inside the main screen you also have a few options – play a slideshow, make a collage, make a movie, make a gift CD, or share photos.

The little buttons at the bottom have also changed – now there is a magnifying glass you can click and drag over thumbnails to magnify them while you are looking for a photo to edit, and there is a slide-bar that lets you change the size of the thumbnails so you see more or less at once.

One other very important function – at the top left, there is an Import button – you can use this to import photos from your camera or other device.

Picasa also has the usual drop-down menus at the top of your computer screen, but I have to admit I haven’t really explored them yet, so for now, this concludes my little “tour” of Picasa.

I’ll be going into a little more detail about some of the specific functions and how/why you’d use them in your photo editing in future posts.

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 would take me an hour to figure out how to get rid of red-eye using one of the big programs, but with picasa, I just click the red-eye button, and poof! Red eyes are gone!

It’s the one-click (or maybe two-click) ease of use that makes me love picasa as a photo editor.

The process I use to edit jewelry photos goes something like this:

• Crop the photo
• If the color is off, either use fill light, auto color, auto contrast, or in “tuning” the neutral color picker to click on something that *should* be white. One of these three usually gets the color back to nearly perfect.
• If I didn’t take the sharpest photo (I’ve been known to not use a tripod, despite being told a million times I should), then I use the sharpen function.
• If I’m feeling artsy, I might add a graduated shadow, or highlight one area of the photo by making the rest soft focus

That’s it! It takes me about a minute to do all that – but the amazing part is, I figured out *how* to do all that stuff the first day or two playing around with the program. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent in paint shop pro or photoshop wondering which of the 500 menus I need to be in to do the seemingly simple thing I want to do.

Now – picasa is definitely not a replacement for either of these programs – if you want to do fancy things with layers, for example, or add a frame to your photo, I don’t think picasa will do that – but for fixing the most common problems with photos, adding text, and resizing, it’s my favorite program.

I’m going to post some tutorials here on how to do some basic fixes with picasa. Don’t be surprised if they are *very* short posts

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 are pretty earrings – green garnets dangling from one of my favorite handmade earwire styles – and you can tell they are pretty if you look closely at the photo.

But I only have a second to grab the attention of potential customers. So I did a re-shoot. Much more eye-catching, don’t you think:

Now, this picture isn’t going to win any photo contests – but I think it does a much better job of grabbing someone’s attention than the first one. The first photo is still in the listing in my etsy shop, but the new one is what people see when browsing – it’s the image that will hopefully make them want to look closer.

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 this. My camera is really good at focusing on a small, specific object (like a pearl, for instance) so anything in the background becomes blurred like this. But I don’t always have something in the background that looks like a landscape!

It’s actually some branches of a lemon tree (looking closely, I can see some lemons) hanging over the lawn that spontaneously decided to grow after our last rain storm, but the angle makes it look like it could be a tree growing on a grassy hillside.

This discovery has inspired me to look closer at all my photos and find hidden gems like this scene. If I was a painter, I think I’d paint this!

Here are a few more photos like this one on flickr

So-so jewelry photo

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 is that the bead actually is a very dark tiger-eye, with brown and black bands. It looks blah in the photo, when in reality, it’s a beautiful bead (at least I think so anyway).

Then again, some look like this:

Better Photo - Amethyst & Peridot Earring

So what’s the difference between so-so photos that give the basic idea, and great photos that make someone want to see more? I thought about it, and here are the tips I’d give myself (or anyone else wanting to take their jewelry shots from so-so to really good).

1. Lighting – For me, natural light gets the best jewelry photos. This means going outside during the day, and setting up my photos somewhere in the yard where I’m not getting too many shadows. It’s not a scientific process, but I seem to get the best results in direct light, but on a day that isn’t too sunny.
2. Background – unless you are really good at styling photos, a simple background is best. I use cardboard boxes, or a sheet of copper, or something else that is flat and all one color, preferably a neutral color not too close to the color of whatever I’m photographing. I bring a few backgrounds outside with me, and try the jewelry on each one. The copper gets the most great photos, but some pieces end up looking better on another background.
3. If you don’t know anything about shutter speed, aperture, etc, use a camera with a really good auto mode. I use a Nikon D40, and about the only setting I ever change is the flash, to turn it on or off. And the zoom, which I use to get the autofocus t focus where I want it to.
4. Learn about macro mode. On most cameras, it’s the little flower setting, and what it means is that your camera is set to take close-up shots. For point-and-shoot cameras, you probably need this setting in order to get halfway decent photos of small things like earrings. BUT if you have a DSLR, like I do, you might actually get better photos on regular mode, using the zoom to get in really close. With my old camera, a Sony Cybershot (older model, the new ones are probably better) I had to use the macro mode, and messing with the zoom in macro mode was not a good thing. So play with your camera – try non-macro and zoom in close, or use macro and physically move the camera to get as close as you can to your subject.
5. Try a bunch of different angles. My backgrounds are small and easy to move, so I set up the shot, then turn the whole thing around so that I get shots from all sides. I also take some from above and some from the side. I also zoom in on different parts of the jewelry – I’ll zoom in on a stone for one shot, then from the same angle, I’ll focus on a different component.
6. Photo editing: crop well. I am a complete idiot when it comes to photo editing software. Pretty much all I can do well is crop. This is very important – if you want people to look at your photos, crop out all the unnecessary stuff, and crop to the shape that you want. For etsy photos, I crop everything square. I’ll make a couple images that show the whole piece, then maybe crop out everything except some detail I want to show off. (You get five shots on etsy, so I try to get five really good ones, and crop them well so people will want to look at all of them. Then I pick the one that looks best as a one inch square and use that for the first image.)
7. Remember that most of your photos won’t be great ones. That’s why I love digital cameras – I can just delete the bad ones and take more, and it doesn’t cost me anything but time. Sometimes a piece just won’t photograph well no matter what I do, and that can be frustrating, but I’m gradually getting more and more good photos, and less that I have to trash. I usually take at least ten pictures of a piece in one “shoot” and maybe 2 or 3 will be good. If I’m lucky, there will be enough to make five images for etsy, but usually I have to re-shoot once or twice before I’m done. Sometimes even more than that – certain stones, like that tiger eye, are really hard to photograph.