What's for dinner? Mmmm.... Rosaries.

I call it "ludicrous lighting".

I figured that since I have nice rosaries and the rosaries that Elwing sent me were really cool, I should take nice pictures. I wanted pictures like the professional auction pictures I've been using. But I know almost nothing about photography.

So, between Elwing and I tinkering with ideas and lighting and web sites, this is what I finally came up with. Luckily my table is so small that I don't need to use stands for the lamps. The box is a "lighting tent" that is used by photographers to do any kind of product photography. The idea is that by lighting the outsides of this translucent colorcorrected white fabric, your object is bathed in non-directed but bright shadowless light. So, that's how it's done.

Jewelry, it turns out, needs one more ridiculously bright light in order to look good. The third light (clipped to the tripod) I actually hold in my hand until I get the best reflection (ie. it looks all sparkly). Since everything is small I have to take the pictures at very high resolution to get any kind of detail. This means that even the movement of me taking the picture shakes the camera too much so I use the delay timer after focusing.

A single rosary can take up to half an hour to position and photograph.