Not all experiments work out well. Some turn out truly awful! And when they go bad, you can’t always reuse every piece (mutilated headpins, for example). But, when they go well, the results are truly satisfying.

“Well’ doesn’t have to be perfect. “Well” might be the one that proves you can do a particular thing, and all you need to do is go back and refine things so you have something you can display and/or sell. While some readers might consider this aspect a no-brainer, trust me, it’s difficult for perfectionists. Often perfectionists are crippled by the feeling that if you’re going to do it, it has to be perfect the first time!

So I try to follow the same philosophy I do when writing fiction when I’m experimenting. It’s okay to have a crappy “first draft.” Hone and perfect and edit once you’ve figured out how to do it. Let me offer an example. I’ve really been wanting to do multi-strand bracelets and necklaces. The thing is, I only have a certain collection of materials, and didn’t want to buy too much new at the time. Bracelets like this were born out of pure experimentation and what I had on hand:

Experimenting with the materials on hand, I made my first triple-strand bracelet.

I’m really pleased with how my idea to keep the strands kind of loose and cross them over each other worked out in this one.

When I wanted to play with multi-strand necklaces, I decided to use some spacer bar ends that I’d purchased but not really done anything with. While the bracelet above is of good quality and for sale, I’m still in the middle of experimenting with this one:

I made this four-strand necklace as a way to experiment with techniques. It still needs work, the top strand needs to be longer for example so that it will lay nicely, but it's a start.

The perfectionist in me doesn’t even like showing stuff that isn’t 100% right, so I consider this picture a bit of therapy. The bars holding up the four strands have loops at the top, which I could use to tie the whole piece together around the back of the neck. However, I won’t, as I need to take it apart and either fix it or cannibalize it.

Remember that you learn much more from failure than from an accidental success, and that experiments that work out well open up whole new doors for your creativity and keep everything fresh and interesting! Finding entirely new ways to use and combine materials that you have on hand is a great way to get out of a rut. Given what a creativity-killers ruts can be, experimentation is a crucial part of a long and fun creative career/hobby.

©2012 Dee's Adornments. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Materials: Vermeil
2. Favorite Materials: Freshwater Pearls
3. Jewelry Photography

The key aspects to deal with in jewelry photography are setting/background, lighting, angles, and situations. Throughout this post I’ll use pictures of the same piece in different contexts so you can see how different aspects are brought out, etc.

A Simple Setting

Your settings and backgrounds should reflect the image you want to project for your shop. I have to admit that I haven’t thought deeply about this aspect yet since I’m still experimenting, but in general, are you trying to project your work as environmentalist? As doing elegant work? As fun and great for parties? Each scenario should suggest different props, backgrounds, etc. An environmentalist might want to use outdoor or recycled items in the pictures. For elegance you might want to look at the web sites for high end jewelry dealers. For parties, decide what kinds of parties and think of the visual elements that conjure those up.

I have four different settings/backgrounds I’m using right now (at this point one of them is “about to use” but it’s part of the grand plan). One of them involves fabric only. I like placing jewelry on a piece of fabric as a way to make the picture pop and have some texture. Here’s an example of a typical shot, I’ve been using this piece of fabric (a pair of harem pants, actually, that a friend made for me for a bellydance class recital that we were doing) since I first started using cloth backgrounds:

I love the contrast of the cloth grain against the shine of the pearls, and the soft fold gives the picture an additional sense of depth.

A lot of people will tell you to choose the cloth in a complimentary color. I like to play fast and loose and experiment on this front, you’ll have to decide what works best for you. I’ve chosen this cloth and some others for various contexts and I photograph every piece in the same collection of contexts. Then I decide which photos I like and which I don’t. Sometimes it’s an interesting surprise.

A Sense of Size

One thing most sellers will tell you to do is give people a visual sense of the size by placing the object in a context that immediately conveys that sense. There are a number of methods of doing this, most of them involving putting something else into the picture that people tend to know the size of. With an international audience this can be a little tricky (if you include a US quarter someone in Taiwan may not have an intrinsic feel for how big that is) but people will still get the gist. Including multiple pictures with multiple chances to see size does help.

One method I use to convey size is a ruler, or more specifically, a square:

Being able to see measurement markings helps the potential buyer understand the piece's size.

If you’re wondering, the cloth here is a placemat. Honestly the mat looks a little plain in person, but as a background in close-up for earrings (especially these earrings since the colors are related) it’s gorgeous. You can see that you don’t need to go out and buy expensive things for props. We actually had this square lying around from handyman and craft projects we’d already done.

A Sense of Shape

Another important thing is to give people a sense of how something’s going to look when it’s worn. One way to do this is to get pictures of people wearing it. I’m in the process of looking for a brave local who wants free jewelry to model for me as I don’t like the results when I try it with myself, but I still get shots of my pieces while hanging by using a jewelry display I purchased for a craft fair:

Hanging the piece gives another feeling for its size, depth, and how it will lie.

You can get a similar effect by using a twig or plant to hang them from. I’ve seen that work well for some people. The background here is the column for our fireplace. I set things up on top of a set of boxes so they’d be at a good height to work from and my dogs couldn’t get in the way, though sometimes I go to edit the shots and find a little dog hair in there. Makes me think I should offer free dog hair with every piece of jewelry.

Getting some pictures of this jewelry hanging from an ear will definitely add more context as well.

Unintended Consequences

I have a gorgeous velvet-ish scarf I thought I’d try for a hanging background but it’s velvet or something similar. The photos at first glance come out great, but when I crop them to just highlight the earrings (and so zoom in further in the process) the photographs always come out looking painted. Really I love the effect in an artistic sense, but it’s not what I’m trying to achieve for my jewelry shots, so I won’t be using this for a background:

Since the products have a shine, they're picking up the texture of the velvet, somewhat, and the combination doesn't clearly photograph at close range.

Orientation

There were numerous things I had to practice. Choosing angles was one, such as how to best highlight a memory wire bracelet versus a regular, more flat bracelet. For example, shooting memory wire bracelets with their stacked coils works best coming down at an angle so that you get a good sense of the piece’s depth and can see how big it is. Here’s an example of a bracelet shot from the top:

Sunset bracelet shot from the top on my windowsill. Pretty but lacks real sense of depth.

And another with it shot from the side, on the same cloth as earlier:

I bunched up the cloth so that the bracelet is sitting at an angle.

This time the cloth is bunched up so the bracelet rests at an angle. Notice how different the color of the cloth looks here? It’s gone from gray to a soft blue. This effect is a combination of lighting and the combination of objects.

Lighting

Speaking of lighting … I don’t even mean lighting just in terms of photography. Color matching is an important facet of making jewelry. Most of the time I can tell what color something is under whatever light, though with varying degrees of shade accuracy. But with crystals I’ve discovered that without some kind of daylight-quality light, I will have blues and greens that are in the same shade and think they’re the same color. Once you’ve finished a piece is not the time to realize that you’ve mixed colors in ways you never intended (sure, sometimes the effect is nice, but often it isn’t).

Also, some of the pieces are quite tiny. Rather than dealing with a lot of squinting, I picked up a magnifying lamp. There are three important features of this particular lamp as far as I’m concerned:

• It’s a tabletop lamp so I can set it on a nice table or any other surface. Some lamps of this time can only be used by clamping them onto something. I don’t want to clamp a lamp onto my dining room table. The lamp also has a bendable arm so that I can position it however I need to.
• It offers a magnifying lense that I can open when I need it. This is a great way to make it easier and more pleasant to work with tiny objects.
• It offers nearly daylight-quality light, which means that I can properly see the colors. Moving this lamp from my working area to my photography area means that I can now take reasonable pictures at night as well as during the day. Before I couldn’t get a good picture of a piece until I waited until day and decent sun, when I live in a rainforest area.

You can find expensive, fancy lamps from jewelry supply shops. I got this one at a local drug store.

Always Something to Learn

The next step for me as far as photography is making a light box. One day I might go for a nice pre-fab kit if business picks up.

For me, the most important thing is to just keep experimenting. What works for me, how I want my shop to look, and the kinds of pieces I make may not work for you at all. The nice thing is that once you know what works, you can fall into a nice routine and the whole process of shooting and processing the photos becomes more zen than chaos.

If you have any additional tips, I’d love to hear them!

©2012 Dee's Adornments. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Materials: Vermeil
2. Selling Locally
3. Experimentation