[PGDesign]

Hi Everybody

Your comments on the photos did make me smile - if you could have seen how 'crudely' they were taken you would have laughed! 10 minutes in my lunchbreak, a bit of white paper on my desk (this is curved up against a stack of CDs), my old and quite hopeless little Canon Ixus, no exposure control (with such a glaring white scene I would normally overexpose) ... followed by a LOT of cleaning up last night on Photoshop! It's just perseverence. Hopefully I can replace these pictures with more professional ones when I'm reunited with my full kit.

I don't use a light box, but some people swear by them, basic ones (and that's all you need really) are cheap and easily sourced on e-Bay. It's important to light the contents as evenly as possible and colour corrected lamps are also available, should you want to go down that route. The next complaint you often hear is that after photographing the 'subject' the scene is a dull, dirty bluish grey. This is because your camera's light meter will read the scene as being very bright, and it will automatically try to reduce this to a more 'acceptable' average value, hence darkening it. The trick is to over-expose by about two thirds of a stop, as I mentioned earlier. If you laid your pearls on a light grey background, all this would be less of an issue. Personally I prefer a white background, even if entails a bit of extra work. It's really nothing more than practice - pearls are very difficult to photograph so a bit of frustration is inevitable.

I have a fondness for that shell, I found it on the beach in Aden when I was 3 years old, it functions as a soap dish these days.

Every photographer I have ever known will say the same thing - a good product photo is almost entirely down to post-production. Photoshop has been around longer than most people realise - significantly longer than digital photography.

PG x