I hate taking pictures.

I made a great pair of earrings, which I just listed on Etsy and had a lot of "fun" with photography as well.  All the pictures in today's blog were taken with the same camera, outside in the same location within 15 minutes of each other.  The earrings look very different in each picture.  I'm glad Etsy allows multiple views of the same item.  The picture above is the one that I think looks the most like the earrings.  The artfully angled mini teapot is a neat prop, I think.  Except for the logistical challenge of getting the earrings to stay on the curved handle, this was an easy picture to take.  Not so much with the picture on the right.  It was taken with my trusty steel dish that I use in nearly every item I shoot and the first few tries came out looking bizarre and green.  I didn't want to photoshop this to death so experimented by varying the distance from the camera to the earrings to allow more light in and allow the camera's automatic light balancing feature to do its thing.

Now it's the time for me to dig out all the old curtains and slipcovers from my old house....I mean dig out all my backdrops.  Against medium grey, the earrings have a lot of shine and metallic look, but the colors are pretty grey as well.  Funny, I thought against the grey they would look less so.

 Against the beige they look pretty accurate as well.  With these pictures I didn't adjust the white balance or hue like I normally do, because there's always a little pixilation, which I was definitely trying to avoid.

 Same light, same camera, against a charcoal grey background.  Notice how the color has shifted entirely to coppery and reddish bronze rather than the plum and gold the earrings look to me against my hand.

This one came out so bizarre I didn't use it at all.  The background is a varied taupe and the earrings are NOT grey and green.  Can't imagine how the camera interpreted this.  It reminds me of a joke a history teacher did once, giving us a report on an archaeological dig and the interpretations of what they found, then telling us what it really was, because it was written from the point of view of a future person digging up an ordinary house.  Ceremonial wall trumpets for a shower head, that sort of thing.


What is the point of all this blathering?  Just to say once again that I hate taking pictures.