Behind the Scenes of a Photo Shoot

Today I thought I'd share a little behind the scenes look at how I photograph pieces for etsy.  I'm a DIY kind of gal, and if i can do something with a home grown solution instead of a lot of expensive equipment, I do it.   So my process for photographing my work to sell online is decidedly low tech.  Here's my photo studio - my kitchen :)

 

It has a small north facing window to the left of the table, and between 10:30am and 1:30pm, the light is perfect.  It's not too bright, it's not too dark, and it doesn't cause a lot of glare.  But, just sticking a planter on my messy table isn't exactly going to bring in the buyers, so I do a little rearranging:

I found out the hard way after photographing a ton of work that the colors in the mahogany table really mess with the color balance in my camera (a canon photoshot elph point and shoot) so I cover part of it with a plain old piece of foam core I found in my closet:

Next, the subject:

As soon as I get a close up shot, the setting works rather well:

I could use any inexpensive photo editing software at this point, since really all I do is crop and dicky around with the contrast, but I use photoshop since I'm comfortable with it and have been using it for years.  After tweaking, here's the finished product:

You can check out all the photos I used in the etsy listing!