Decent Pictures?

 I'll be the first to admit that I am photographically challenged.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  The first is that my camera and setup are miserable and the second is that I am working on my attitude towards taking pictures of my work.  I've always had a casual attitude about pictures in general, something like "I know what it is."  This doesn't work for trying to sell things.  I am working on improving both my attitude and my ability.  Above is a picture of a pair of earrings I recently listed on Etsy.  I'm really happy with the way it turned out.  Below is a picture of the best I would have been able to do before I figured out how to use that part of my editing software.  It's a decent picture, but in the one above, these earrings really shine.

Same with these beads.  This one's with software, and below is without, and I am very happy with how the software works.

 Of course, there are still things I don't know how to do, and one of them is to make things show up well on black.  My pictures are either washed out of blurry, or both.

Here are the watermelon beads I just listed, and I am happy with the picture above both because it spotlights the beads and because it is a slightly different composition than the ones I've used before.