Sometimes it IS the equipment

I’ve been strug­gling with pho­tograph­ing my lam­p­work, that is, when I could make myself TRY to pho­to­graph it with our Kodak point-​and-​shoot dig­i­tal cam­era. No mat­ter what I did, I ended up frus­trated. It was almost impos­si­ble to get decently focused pic­tures even using the macro set­ting; get­ting enough light was a her­culean task; find­ing a back­ground that didn’t look sim­ply awful, well… It all made me put off pho­tograph­ing if there was any­thing else at all to do.

I thought it was just me being inept. So Andrea came over to give me a pho­tog­ra­phy tuto­r­ial. It helped, but not enough. We were able to improve the light­ing and the back­grounds, but the focus still wouldn’t behave.

Finally, I real­ized that maybe it wasn’t just me. Maybe it really WAS the equip­ment. Maybe it was time to upgrade to a DSLR — some­thing that DH has been cov­et­ing for years, but nei­ther of us could jus­tify the cost…until it became a busi­ness issue.? So I started my usual thor­ough research.

One of my first thoughts was “could I, should I reuse my old SLR lenses from my film cam­era?” As it turns out, if I was will­ing to live with man­ual focus (um, YEAH, NOT a prob­lem), the answer was “ABSOLUTELY.” My reg­u­lar lens is noth­ing too spe­cial, but my macro zoom lens, a Viv­i­tar Series I 70-​210mm Komine, turns out to be some­thing of a cult item today. Since it’s a Pen­tax mount lens (I had a Pen­tax ME Super), I ignored the omnipresent Canons and Nikons and set­tled on the Pen­tax K200D after ver­i­fy­ing that today’s Pen­tax bod­ies do indeed play nice with legacy lenses. Then the ques­tion was where to buy it — there are a LOT of dis­rep­utable cam­era equip­ment sell­ers out there.? All my research pointed to B&H Pho­tog­ra­phy, so I placed my order Sat­ur­day night (the store is appar­ently owned by Hasidic Jews, so not only is the store­front not open on Sat­ur­day, they won’t even accept web orders on the Sabbath!).

The cam­era arrived last night. I unpacked it, set it up, swiped the old SD mem­ory card from the Kodak, and started exper­i­ment­ing. It was imme­di­ately clear I had some learnin’ to do!

Today after Thanks­giv­ing din­ner, Andrea and I went in the stu­dio and decided to get it work­ing. It took some exper­i­ment­ing with both lenses, finagling to get the tri­pod at the right dis­tance with the lens, and get­ting a step­stool so vertically-​challenged me could stand on it to see through the viewfinder look­ing down at an angle at the beads, but…

OH ?? MY??? GOD.

I could actu­ally FOCUS on the beads. The shots were clear.? The two-​second timer fea­ture kept me from jig­gling the cam­era, even on the tri­pod, as I took the pic­ture. The light­ing could still use some improve­ment, but that’s easy, and until I can do it GIMP will adjust for it just fine.

I think I’m going to be able to stop pro­cras­ti­nat­ing on the pho­tog­ra­phy. I think I’ll be able to get things pho­tographed for sale in a rea­son­ably timely fash­ion. I’ve already revised my 1000 Mar­kets shop and resub­mit­ted it for approval, com­plete with new photos.

Here’s just a cou­ple of exam­ples of what we did tonight:

Autumn Leaf Pendant

Red Heart Pendant

Red Tear Drop Pendant