Photographing Jewelry–The MacGyver Tabletop Studio

By Tina on December 8, 2008

The setup

In  a past life, I was a journalism major with a concentration in photography. That was a very, very long time ago. There’s a huge difference between shooting candids for news stories and shooting macro photos of jewelry. Light type, settings, cameras, it’s enough to make a gal’s head spin! I’ve found a few really nice resources for macro photography on the cheap though that have made things a little less confusing:

  • Strobist: Awesome resource that focuses on studio photography and lighting on the cheap. This guy gets it: not all of us have thousands of dollars to drop on a setup, but we still want our photos to look as good as possible. He also has a flickr group.
  • Digital Photography School: One of the first resources I actually started looking at, years ago.
  • Jewelry Photography Tips: Aside from the fact that the writer is really trying to push products, this actually has some good tips. Just remember, you don’t have to buy everything they’re selling in order to take a decent picture!
  • Tips for Photographing Jewelry (from Home Jewelry Business Success Tips): This article has links to a lot of different techniques, including an article on  how to use your flatbed scanner to photograph jewelry.

For my own work, I use the “Macgyver Studio” setup of three worklamps, a homemade lightbox and a granite tile. Currently I only have a white one, but I’d like to get a black one as well (both are just chock full of shiny). It cost me next to nothing to make, since I had everything in the house already, and lots of duct tape was involved.

The light box was made from an old, sturdy packing box. I used a box cutter to cut out a rectangle in the bottom, the two narrow sides and one long side. This gave me a solid back, a shooting window, and three light source windows. From there, I duct-taped some translucent plastic to the top and two of the sides, got some thick white backing paper for my background, and set the whole thing on a granite tile. I should also note that the holes I cut out of the box were repurposed to make light bounces by using some aluminum foil from my kitchen (these come in handy when you want to bounce some light off the front of an object without casting a huge shadow.

P1017161.jpg

The result

The clamp lights are a mixture of inherited lights and some worklamps I got a home depot a few years ago. I used daylight bulbs in them and clamped them above the plastic windows.

Other than being extremely inexpensive, this setup has the benefit of being fairly portable. On a really sunny day, I can take this whole thing outside and use real daylight (which is in short supply up here in Cleveland during the winter months).

I kind of love how this setup allows for closeups, but even with decent lighting I still need to do some post processing. Cropping, contrast, all of that stuff – it’s fun, but it requires some fiddling with controls and stuff to make sure that everything looks as nice as it can. Some people use photoshop, which I love, but  I like to use either Photoshop Lightroom (a professional post-processing program), or Picnik when I don’t feel like firing up Lightroom or when I notice something I want changed when I’m in Flickr or Webshots. The really nice hing about Picnik is that it ties in directly with Flickr and Webshots, so you can edit photos you’ve already uploaded without downloading them, editing them, and then re-uploading them. I kind of love it.

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Aside from the idea that god hates me, everything is fine

By Tina on November 25, 2008

blastoid pendulum earrings

I just haven’t posted in a bit. I’ve been incredibly busy with work, been trying to get in some time in my studio, and I’ve been combating craziness on all levels of life. To say that life has been a whirlwind would be understating things by just a tad.

So what about that studio time? Well, I’ve been doing more etching with copper, creating some new designs (mostly earrings), and I’ve been trying to invest more time into photographing my work in my shabby little tabletop studio. So far, so ok. I’ve got

some plans for a few photography posts about making your own shabby little tabletop studio for under $20 dollars and photographing work, but those need to come when I’m on vacation (hahaha… vacation? VACATION? Internets, I know no such word!), or perhaps this holiday weekend when I’m holed up in a hotel.

Coming up soon(ish) are:

  1. new site design
  2. more etsy-ish type stuff
  3. some semi-interesting writing on important arty type stuff

The only thing required is that I have some time to stop and breathe.

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Protecting yourself from your jewelry (and vice versa)

By Tina on October 19, 2008

sweet, sweet honey, by BotheredByBees

If you work with copper, you’ve probably noticed that sometimes your pieces turn your skin green. Personally, this doesn’t really bother me that much, but I know plenty of people who are turned off from copper because of this reaction. You’ve probably also noticed that your work darkens with wear. Again, I kind of love this about copper, but it can be undesirable with certain pieces.

There’s a lot of writing out there on how to keep these chemical reactions from happening and a few people who swear that this never happens to them because of superior body chemistry (guess what? You get a cookie. Now leave the rest of us chemically inferior people alone to find ways to help ourselves). So far I haven’t found the silver bullet cure-all for this, but I’ve found a few remedies that work.

  1. Turtle wax (yes, the stuff you put on your car).
    Wipe it on, wait a few minutes for it to dry, then buff. I’ve had moderate success with this method, but I was turned off by my jewelry smelling like a car wash.
  2. Clear nail polish.
    This wasn’t a good solution for me. The nail polish flaked off, it yellowed, and it just didn’t look very attractive. I can see how this would be an attractive “quick fix” for the person in a bind, but this really isn’t a long term solution.
  3. Floor wax
    Future floor wax is one of those treatments that gets a lot of lip service in the diy community. It works all right, but it’s in the same category as turtle wax in my book.
  4. Home remedies
    Some of these are really unique, but the one I really love and am currently trying is from Tim McCreight. I cleaned one of the many baby food jars we have knocking around the house and melted beeswax in it. Then I added safflower oil, while stirring, and just a little bit of jasmine oil, just for the heck of it. Now, McCreight says to use turpentine, but I figured that since safflower oil has polymerization qualities to it, it would work as well. The upside to this one is that it’s multipurpose. It’s a jewelry protectant, a shoe polish, a furniture polish, and it’s all natural. No nasty chemicals, easy to make and easy to apply. I just take a small rag, wipe it on the piece and buff it after a few minutes. Beeswax isn’t the cheapest stuff in the world, but if you have a local apiary (bee farm), you may be able to buy some fresh stuff off of them. A litle bit goes a long way.


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Copper etching at home, the Burning River way

By Tina on October 12, 2008

  • Ingredients for your own home copper etching tank

  • Muriatic Acid (Hydrochloric or “Pool” acid)
  • Hydrogen Peroxide (some people use the hair-bleach strength, I just use the drugstore strength)
  • A glass container large enough for your work with a cover (I use an old casserole dish with its own glass lid)
  • Tongs/gloves/something to pick stuff up with

  • Mix 2 parts hydrogen peroxide to one part acid (ALWAYS add acid second!) in your glass container. Now you’re ready to add your copper piece and bask in the magic of etching!

  • Illustrated instructions here

In my previous life as a graduate student, I took a lot of printmaking courses. I learned how to create wood and linoleum cuts, silkscreen (also known as seriography), and how to create etchings.

Etchings were special to me because they were kind of magic. You’d take a plain piece of metal, cover it in goo, scratch into said goo, then put it in actual, honest to god acid. You know, like the supervillians use. Out of this goo and acid process, you’d get a plate that had your artwork permanently incribed in it. From there you could transfer this art, with the help of some ink and a fancy-dancy printing press, to paper and make copies of it (or prints, for the purist). The prints didn’t excite me half as much as the etching process though, because of the whole magic aspect of it all.

When I started making jewelry again, I kept thinking about etching. Since I work a lot with copper, it just seemed natural to want to etch designs into some of my work. The only problem was that I was (and still am) working out of a basement studio. I didn’t think I had access to things like Dutch Mordant and all the other things that we used to use in the printmaking studio. Little did I know that I didn’t really need all of that.

Taking a look at sites like Instructables, I soon learned that there is more than one way to skin a cat (or etch a clasp). Instead of using a lot of fancy mixes or powders, and in place of using sort of harmful things like circuit-board etchant, I discovered that you can etch copper with items bought at home depot and the drugstore. Excellent. By the way, etching aluminum requires only the hydrochloric (muriatic) acid.

Once you have the solution made, you can use permanent marker to cover your copper, laser-printer or photocopier toner (print out your design on acetate, then transfer to the copper using an iron), or you can get some asphaltum or ground from an art supply store like Dick Blick or Utrecht (also look at Ball Grounds) to protect parts of the plate from the acid while uncovered parts of the plate etch. You can remove these with acetate (nail polish remover),or you can heat the metal slightly and polish off the excess with a cloth.

This method doesn’t have to be applied to jewelry components only, either. This could also be an interesting way to do tags and business cards, by embossing heavy paper with whatever design/logo/text you’ve created. Too many cool possible uses to list, but I think you get the picture.

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Someone stop this ride–I want off

By Tina on October 12, 2008

So much for the three posts a week goal… at least so far. Last week was a bit of a bear, what with me needing to be ensconsed in bubble wrap for my own protection. On Monday (and this is just on monday), I managed to take out the clothes dryer, decimate the iron, and have reason to fix yet another flat tire, all before 7:30 AM. The rest of the day? Not much better. The next day I ate the most expensive piece of chicken I’ve ever had, resulting in an emergency dental appointment to fix a gaping hole where a quarter of my back molar used to be. The week just went on from there.
The best parts about all this is that I’m still here, my family’s still intact, and my house isn’t a smoking crater. Some weeks, that all you can ask for.

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History

By Tina on September 30, 2008

pagoda

Pagoda Earrings

Every story has a beginning. Mine starts when I was around eleven or twelve. See, I was in middle school in a fairly wealthy suburb of Columbus, Ohio.

All the girls would get their friends presents for Christmas – fairly inexpensive gifts, but costs add up. Since I had an older sister that my parents were helping with college (and an older brother who had just finished college a few years earlier ), my parents understandably put a price limit on my gift-giving budget. My very creative sis came to my rescue: she taught me some basic wireworking skills, took me to a local bead shop, and taught me how to make simple earrings.

From then on, the somple cost-saving measure of DIY jewelry as gifts became a bit of a hobby, which turned into an on-again/off-again passion. I didn’t do much in the way of fabrication until later in high school, when I began hammering, shaping and filing scraps of copper wire to make bracelets and rings.

By the time I got to graduate school, I had all but abandoned jewelry in favor of other artistic outlets. While the university I attended offered jewelry making courses, the resulting work was intimidating both in terms of cost and accesibility. A lot of the work was really cerebral: symbolic pieces that seemed to be meant for display rather than actual use.

I only recently got back into making jewelry, possibly because of the academic intimidation, though I have no one to blame but myself for that. I’ve been doing a lot of self-instruction: remembering techniques some of my friends from university had demonstrated and relying heavily on the graciousness of the Internet. The way I figure it, the learning is going to be messy, but the knowledge (and the resulting pretties) is a huge reward.

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Mama’s got a brand new blog

By Tina on September 28, 2008

I’ve been blogging off and on for a while back at my old site, Distracted Mind but frankly, the writing got stale. It had no focus, no oomph. It devolved into a link blog, and even that got stagnant. Like, no posts in months sort of stagnant. I’ve been busy doing other things, like starting a new job, getting used to having two kids, getting used to having a new baby with reflux problems, firing a daycare, finding a nanny, and making lots and lots of jewelry. Seriously – it’s been a madhouse ’round these parts. Oh, did I mention that I also turned 30? Sweet buttery Jeebus, the things, they are a happenin’.

So, since I’m kind of abandoning Distracted Mind to the ether, at least for now, what’s Burning River Studio all about? Well, a professor once told me that I should write about what sets my blood on fire: my passions. So that’s what I’m going to do. This blog is going to be about art – both two dimensional (yeah, I still do a bit of that) and three dimensional (like jewelry). How I make it, what I’m making, what gets me going, and how I find time to do any of it with a full time job, two kids and a spouse. I’m also going to talk about some of the more touchy subjects of jewelry making and art, like cultural inspirations and how to tread the line between inspiration and co-opting a cultural aesthetic, which is something I’ve been examining in my own work.

I’m trying to keep myself to the goal of at least three posts a week, so that I can keep up with my writing as well as my work. For me, this is an exercise in finding the words to explain my work as well as another creative outlet. If I get anyone reading this, great. If not, it will be a good artist’s diary to put my own notes in for future reference.

That is all.

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