Last month I attended a one day product photography workshop which was organised by the Crafts Council of Ireland. As a maker it’s extremely important to document your work, I am guilty of letting pieces leave the workshop without taking any photographs of the finished piece.
Working with metal which is highly reflective also has it’s disadvantages when it comes to photography. I have so many photographs of my jewellery which could be mistaken as self portraits as my face pops up in the reflection of the piece. I have tried everything from photoshopping to sneaking up on the piece with my camera hoping it won’t see me! I’ve found from plenty of attempts that I get my best results from a light tent I bought on Amazon last year. It’s the best €10 I’ve spent! I wrote a post about how I use it to reduces reflections photographing jewellery. While I get good results from the light tent I wanted to explore other techniques of how best to avoid reflections.
I went along to the Vienna Woods hotel in Cork armed with my camera and a few of my silver hand raised bowls. The great thing about the day was how practical it was. We didn’t sit around all day talking about shutter speeds and apertures, we went through a few techniques and then got stuck into photographing our work.
It was great to be able to explore what we had learnt by taking photographs of our own work using our own equipment. Here are some of my photos from the day. You’ll be delighted to see I don’t feature in any of them! Maybe I’ve finally cracked the art of photographing reflective surfaces 🙂
