October 13, 2008 by Amy

Sharing

My friend at work likes to make jewelry. Beads are to her what lenses are to me. We have many discussions over lunch about our respective passions, and how important it is to have something that serves so many purposes in your life (joy, time-killer, independence producer, escape, etc.). She shares her passion with me by bestowing jewelry upon me way too often. I’m trying to share mine with her by creating photographs of her work for her. She gets bored after one iteration, so all of her pieces are original, one-of-a-kinds. I once asked her if she had photographs of them, so she could at least remember what she’s done. Nope. She just makes ’em and moves on, but isn’t that a great idea?

Since I’m learning more and more about studio work, I offered to try my hand at making images of her work. Turns out photographing jewelry is a lot harder than I thought. My lighting sucks on these and I don’t do them justice, but I’m learning.

I think my next Schiller’s purchase will be a product box: essentially a little tent into which you place items you wish to photograph, and the tent serves to diffuse the light so you get a lovely, soft glow. No harsh highlights or flare or whathaveyou.

I have cropped these to a square format because my colleage makes her jewelry with another woman by the same name, so they call their designs J-Squared. Their business cards are square, and the boxes their pieces come in are square. I’m a kook for consistency, so I cropped the images to square, too.

I’m totally digging this “documentary photography” thing. What a great way to remember things and create a visual record.