Reading Peyote Patterns

Great link for reading peyote patterns!!!
http://www.rubysbeadwork.com/ReadingPeyotePatterns.html

Taking Photos of Jewelry

I am not a photographer!  With that said, I feel that I do take good photos of my jewelry and some of you out there in the internet world must agree somewhat.  I have had several people ask about my camera and how I photograph my jewelry.  I am writing this post to answer those questions.

The camera I use is an Olympus Stylus-90000.  It is at least 5 years old.  It is a point and shoot type camera, but with some changable functions.

I do use a light box that I purchased.  Here are some photos of it.  Keep in mind that I keep it in a storage closet!

Notice that in the photos there is a tripod for my camera.  I tend to shake and move the camera about when I take photos without my tripod!  I don't think that the brand of light box nor lights make that much of a difference.  I feel that one must use the settings on the camera to take better photos.

The settings I use on my camera are WB (white balance), macro, and +/-.  I set my WB to the sun symbol for bright light.  I use the macro "on" setting (flower symbol)...sometimes I even use the super macro setting.  These help, but I have found that the +/- (I think its called the aperature.) is the most imortant.  On my camera I can display a bar graph of the lighting and I know to keep the red next to the right side of the graph.  I take several photos at the +/- on 0.0 then move up to +0.3, +0.7, and/or +1.0.  I download the photos to my computer and choose the best looking one as the one I save.  If I happen to use a black background, I tend to move the +/- into the negative numbers and do the same thing.

I know that a lot of people use a photo editing program on the computer to enhance their photos.  I saved my Microsoft Office Picture Manager from 2003 and still use it if I need to crop or brighten.  I like that I can change the light, medium, and dark areas with this program.  Plus it is easy to use!

These are the things I do to take photos of my jewelry.  I hope it will help some others out there!  Remember I am not a photographer and all my learnings have occurred from trial and error!  And a lot of errors!!!