Happy Valentine's Day

For Valentine's Day my honey and I bought ourselves a new camera. We do quite a bit of traveling and our little point and shoot is great but hubby wanted to get back into some photography and I really need to learn to take more professional photos of my jewelry, so here we are. New camera and I'm thanking that it has an Auto mode so that I can learn the manual mode at a slow and easy pace. Lighting and focus is one of my biggest obstacles. We do have a couple of light boxes but most of the time I just try to find the best light in the house and photograph the pieces right there on the table top.

I have several jewelry pieces on my table I had set aside to photograph and put out on ArtFire for sale, so here is a collage of some of those items which are my first photos shot with this new camera. There was no sunlight and I was just using an Ottlight on my craft table.

They aren't too bad. I think the crystals turned out the best and I usually have a lot of trouble taking good photos of clear or crystal pieces. The other two on the bottom need to be redone. You can't see the play of color on the boulder opal and you don't see the beautiful blue color on the peruvian opal piece.

I guess you could say I'm in testing phase and hopefully one day I will get to the point where I can take the camera off of auto and still take good photos.

Don't be surprised if you hear of my ups and downs of learning how to use this camera. Oh, the camera is a Nikon D5000 if you want to check it out.