Oh. My. Squee.

Talk about Karma. If maybe you hadn’t guessed, I am one of the world’s biggest Totoro fangirls, ever. One of the main reasons I want to have kids is so that I can make a Totoro-themed nursery for them.

There are five different colors. Here are a couple more of them:

And they don’t even cost $5! I’m going to put up a post in the forums on Swap-bot for anyone who wants to swap me something for these babies, because this is too good a find not to share.

Here’s a link to the forum thread: http://www.swap-bot.com/forums/topic/59008

Happy Swapping!

Not only is it an excellent way to meet new friends and bring smiles to the faces of strangers, it’s a great way to get craft supplies, collectibles, and other stuff from places you don’t have access to.  Plus, who doesn’t love getting packages in the mail?

If you’re a crafter, you’ve probably got a stash taking up a bunch of storage space.  Why not go through it and see what bits and pieces could be sent off to better homes?  Or, if you have money, support your local economy and find some fun, inexpensive goodies.

At first you’re limited to 5 official swaps.  After you complete those successfully, the limit is 20.  However, there are also forum games called Tags where you tag someone to send you stuff or to send stuff to, and people tag you in return.

I went a little nuts.  I signed up for 5 swaps immediately, and then tagged 6 people, and then decided to do a Random Act of Kindness as well.  It’s a good thing I got paid today.  >.<

These are the swaps I’m sending out tomorrow.  I still have two more to put together, and then I have to figure out something Twilighty to make for one of the people from a tag game.  Team Jacob.

I drew little swap-bot envelopes on the packages.  I’m cool like that.

I’ll update when I receive my first swap package.  Once I get going on this, I think it will be easier and less expensive to keep up with.  Regifting will probably happen.

Postage will be the biggest expense, I think… oh well.  I’ve had too many friends who’ve worked for the post office to begrudge that institution any support.  (Though the flat-rate mailing boxes are, frankly, ridiculous.)

Anyway, I’m excited.  =)  Check out the site, it’s a ton of fun and I have a feeling it will prove addictive.

POUNCE. Etsy has a tool that will show you shops that haven’t made any sales yet.  Got an extra five bucks?  Find a shop without any sales with some inexpensive items and buy one.  Maybe you’ll find something you really love!  And even if you don’t, isn’t the thought of someone breaking into a huge smile and doing a victory dance because they just made their first sale worth $5?

TREASURIES. if you’d rather spend time than money, consider making a treasury.  It’s a great way to show a talented seller you appreciate their work… much better than just hearting an item.  And it’s a good creative exercise too!  You can throw in a bit of self-promotion, as well, by adding an item of yours to your treasury.  If people like it, it might even end up on the front page of etsy!  Just be sure to let the people who you’ve featured know that they’re in your treasury.

Here are the treasuries I’ve made.

GET SOCIAL. Chat and the Forums are AWESOME tools for meeting other etsy sellers and seeing some great shops.  With chat, try to get in on a five-minute FS (Featured Seller)session.  Everyone spends five minutes gushing over a featured seller (someone in the chatroom) and then that seller picks another.  Sales are made, and friendships too.  It’s a blast.  In the forums, someone’s always looking for advice and feedback.  There are lots of people you can help with just a few minutes of your time.

GIVE A SHOUT-OUT. Have a blog?  Have a Twitter account?  Let your followers know about something awesome you found on etsy!

PARTICIPATE. Check the forums and other craft blogs.  There are great people organizing contests, swaps, and lots of other group events that will help you make new friends and promote everyone’s work.  For example, check out the July Contest here at WTF etsy, a craft blog.

So there you are.  Have fun spreading the love and bringing smiles to people’s faces!   Not only will making people happy make YOU happy in return, you’ll increase the number of views your shop gets as people try to discover who this wonderful person is that just made their day.  <3

There will be extensive tweaking as the week progresses, and then in the end there will be a brighter, cleaner blog as a reward.

Please be patient with me in the meantime.  =)

Much belated, but as promised, how to photograph your item in natural light. The item I am using is a pair of earrings which feature some fake pearls in a pastel green color.

There are several problems with photographing in natural light, and several benefits.  Let me say right off the bat that I prefer it to artificial light.

That being said, let’s look at some of the problems with it.

The biggest one is that unfiltered daylight is very harsh.  It creates strong, hard-edged shadows and deep contrast that is very unflattering to the item you are photographing.

Harsh Light vs. Diffuse Light

Another problem is that the quality of daylight can change depending on the time of day, weather conditions, part of the world, time of the year, and many other factors.

Also, you’re limited as to when you can photograph your items if you use daylight.  Especially in winter, you can’t just photograph your items after you get home from work.

I tried photographing this pair of earrings at 8 am at the beginning of March (I believe).  For some reason, my custom white balance repeatedly returned this result:

I have no clue why. Even with the camera white balance set to “Cloudy” (which, since it was early morning, I felt was more appropriate than “Daylight”), the result was much too dark to be used without extensive editing. If you do too much editing, it becomes very apparent, and you can no longer accurately capture the item’s appearance.

Ok, enough with the bad stuff. If you look at the pictures above, you can see that, although they’re dark and blue, the shadows are very soft. This isn’t because the light is dim. This is because the light is diffuse.

Natural sunlight, when used properly, gives much better color than artificial light. It’s also cheaper, and easier on the environment.

The light I use is diffuse for two reasons. Number one is that it is not direct sunlight. I set the items on a piece of white or colored paper on a windowsill. It’s on a side of the house that only gets partial sunlight, so the light coming through the window is softer than if it were on a side of the house where the sun shines straight in.

Bad, harsh light. Deep Contrast.

This light is better. Far less contrast, the shadows are softer.

The second reason is that I actually have some semi-transparent plastic sheeting over my window to help with insulation (since I have single-pane windows and my house was built by a contractor with leftovers from his job sites). This helps diffuse the sunlight even more.

I don’t have an easy answer for how you can duplicate these conditions wherever you are. Here are some tips to help you find a good spot, though:

• Look at the shadows. If the things already in the area you’re looking at have really dark, defined shadows, so will the things you put there to photograph.
  
• Don’t let bright light fool you. When you’re standing outside, or even if you’ve just been looking at an area that’s in bright sun for a while, areas out of that bright light seem really, really dark. Our eyes naturally adapt to bright and dim lighting. Your camera can, too. That being said, not all shade is equal. If you’re going to photograph your item outside, be prepared to take a few test shots.
  
• Avoid mixed or uneven lighting. The dappled light of sun through leaves may seem picturesque, but your photograph will end up looking blotchy and unprofessional. If you can manipulate the light or the subject so that the foreground is lit and the background is in shade, give it a shot. But this is tricky, especially with leaves, which are usually blowing in the breeze.
  
• Take test photos, and don’t trust the viewscreen. I’ve taken pictures that have looked too warm on the viewscreen, gotten them on the computer, and they’ve been too cold. If possible, look at your test photos on more than one computer screen, too.
  
• Come back to it later. Be sure to revisit the test photos or your area when your eyes have adjusted to a different type of light. It may look very different.
  

If you can get some clear plastic sheeting, you might want to play with that, too.

Here’s what my spot looks like:

So once you’ve found your spot, find a nice piece of paper or cloth or whatever else to set your item on, and let’s get started.

Using Props

In my first example, I’m going to talk about using “props” to display your items, or, in other words, using things that don’t just lie flat.

Hooray! The thing I used before fits on the windowsill. But how can I photograph my item hanging from it without getting a weird, shadowy (or bright blue) background?

Not too hard. No matter what angle you’re photographing from, you can probably find a way to keep the paper in the background. However, DO NOT do this:

Blocking the light source = very bad.

Anyhoo, let’s stick the earrings on the thing and see how it looks. (I ended up flipping the rack upside down because of the way the earrings were hanging.)

Not too bad. I had to turn the paper and the prop to get what I wanted, but with a bit of editing, this will turn out just fine.

There is one very big bad thing about this photo, and that is that the lines of the photo draw the eye away from the earrings. All the lines of the rack point off the edge of the photo, when they should be pointing towards the subject. So this photo wins no composition awards. However, that isn’t what this tutorial is about.

If I could have, I would have liked to put something white on the other side of the earrings, for more even lighting. If I had a sibling, I’d put a white shirt on them and make them stand by it. Sometimes wearing a white shirt yourself can help. DO NOT wear a brightly colored shirt when you’re photographing anything close-up. The light will reflect off of it and it will show in your photo.

Using Paper

Fairly simple.

Or, prop the paper against a jar or something heavy.

Remember: the best way to learn something is by DOING IT! So go have fun!

Pictures are VERY important to blogging, especially for how-tos.  You can’t just write without them.  But if you write a tutorial about something digital, screen-shots or google can provide your images.

My last two posts are examples of this.  Another example would be writing a tut on how to edit product photos.

And now, on to the exciting part… I get to learn how to use PMC!  And I don’t even have to buy a $600 kiln!

I do web design & management for a local sculptor who is currently making hand-carved pendants (which you can see here ^_^), and he’s getting into PMC, and he’s going to teach me, too.  I am so totally jazzed about this.

Here are a few awesome PMC creations alá Etsy:

Two Leaves Handmade Clasp by WillowAndMe

Achieve Maximum Happiness Bracelet by westbyron

Love Heals Fern Ring by TeresaBoland

For those who don’t know, PMC stands for precious metal clay.  It is a precious metal mixed with some kind of chemicals that make it workable in a way similar to polymer clay.  Once you make whatever you want to make, you let it dry a bit, stick it in a kiln, and all of the chemicals burn off, leaving the pure silver, gold, copper, or bronze.  There are whispers of an upcoming aluminum PMC too, apparently, which should prove interesting.

Anyway, it’s completely awesome.  And I will, of course, be taking photos and sharing the process with you lovely people out there in the craftosphere.

Many thanks to the lovely and talented PMC artists who let me use their photos and gave me a little extra info on PMC!  You rock!

ScribeFire sits down at the bottom right corner of your browser window until you click on it.  When you do that it will either slide up, covering the bottom half of whatever page your on; open in a new tab; or open in a new window.  The default is sliding up and I must say I enjoy being able to look at two things simultaneously.  I can see this being especially useful if I am posting about another website.

If you close out the ScribeFire window, you won’t lose what you were writing.  If you close out the window you were writing in, and open ScribeFire in a different window, you won’t lose what you were writing.  If you quit FireFox altogether, you still won’t lose what you were writing, but it will come back up with some funky line breaks.

I can’t speak for how this will work in Chrome, because I don’t use Chrome.  They do have it for Chrome though.

ScribeFire has some very nice features.  You can edit all of your blogs from the same window; just select which one you’re working on at the moment.  You can add the post to a category, view and edit other posts from the blog and drafts, tag, timestamp, add Trackback URLs, and a lot more, all from a little side options menu that’s convenient and doesn’t take up too much space.

Plus, from one of the tabs on the left, you can share your blog post with just about every tool there is for sharing websites EXCEPT TWITTER.

Setting up Scribefire to work with your blog is very simple, and, unlike Word, it will tell you what went wrong if something goes wrong.  This is how I found out that I hadn’t enabled remote publishing.

The formatting toolbar is simple, but it gives you pretty much everything you need, from §pecial ©haracters to embedding a youtube video.

There are a couple things wrong with ScribeFire and they are real pains in the ass.  Namely, the Live Preview option and publishing images.

The Live Preview option posts a temporary post to your blog so that it can get the formatting.  I don’t know what this means, and I don’t know what this does, because after about two minutes I gave up on waiting for it to load.

I’m normally very patient, because I’m normally using dial-up.  Right now I’m using the school’s internet connection, which is very fast, and it still took forever.

What it took forever with, though, is this:

If you copy-paste an image into your post, be prepared to spend at least five minutes staring at this annoying little box.  And you won’t be able to visit any of the other tabs in your window while this is happening.  You have to open an entirely new window.

After a full five minutes of waiting, I eventually gave up on posting my blog post from ScribeFire.  Even my dial-up connection can upload images faster than this.  It isn’t like they’re big files.

So, since I think images are very important to good blogging, I probably won’t be using this for anything more than quick, image-less notes.  Which is a pity, because I was growing rather fond of it.

There are so many different apps, addons, plugins, and free tools for posting to your blog or your twitter account that there is practically no reason to ever actually stop what you’re doing to update your blog. Writing a research paper? Update your blog from MS Word while you’re at it. Checking your email? Most blog services now offer blog posting via email. Browsing the web? Waiting for Farmville to load? (God, I hope not.) Check out ScribeFire, a web browser plugin that lets you post to your blog from any website. Plus, there are numerous addons that let you update your twitter from your address bar. I use TwitterBar.

Basically the only way you can’t update your blog or twitter is by actually putting pencil to paper and physically writing. There are 50 million different tools for sharing every facet of your life with the entire world. Privacy? That’s so 2001.

Can you remember the outrage over phone tapping, just a few years ago? Lately it seems like phone tapping is a waste of effort. Why tap someone’s phone when you can just subscribe to their podcast, youtube channel, blog, twitter, facebook, or myspace page to find out everything about them?

Anyway, enough ranting. (Because to be honest… I love this insane social web of information.) Let me do an overview of a few ways to make keeping your blog updated more like a goal instead of a pipe dream.

Today I hit the new document button in MS Word and it gave me two options: blank document or new blog post.

WTF? I said. But it’s true – Word has jumped on the blogospherical bandwagon, and you can now publish posts to your blog while pretending to write that essay you’ve been putting off for weeks.

It’s pretty straightforward – start a new blog post, set up your account in two easy steps, and go. One thing to remember though: make sure you have your blog set so that remote publishing is enabled. I didn’t, and there were some definite moments of hair-tearing frustration until I figured it out. They just tell you that it isn’t working. They don’t tell you why.

This is how the post looks from the Word document. Yay, screenshots.

The greatest thing about this is that it’s as easy to edit the formatting of your post as is it to format any Word document. You can categorize your blog with the “Insert Category” button; a drop-down menu appears and you select which one you want, or add a new one.

I haven’t found a way to tag the post yet, so if you want to do that, you will have to go back to your actual blog site and edit the post from there. So much work. But the ease of formatting and the fact that you can copy-paste images earns my respect for this method of blog posting.

Incidentally, this is what a blog post looks like when posted from MS Word.

Next up: ScribeFire.

However, I had a lovely weekend in Pebble Beach. I always get so inspired whenever I go there! I also bought a lot of awesome hand-made glass beads for a pretty good price.

Right now I’m sitting backstage, so no pictures yet. I’ll get them up ASAP – pictures of the beads, the awesome necklace I made, the beach, and whatever else I find to put up.

I also came up with an awesome idea for… a tutorial! For using up all the leftover seed beads you were too lazy to sort and put away. I think it’ll turn out really well.

Back soon!

Pepper

I’ve found a tutorial that shows a very easy way to make one… all you need is a cardboard box, tape, white tissue paper, white posterboard, and a desk lamp.

Here it is.

So now you have your item and your lightbox.  This part of the guide works best for items smaller than a coffee mug.  That’ what I make, and that’s what I know how to do.

My Light Box

Ok, first things first.  You need to know how to use your camera.  So grab your instruction booklet, or try and figure it out yourself if you’ve lost said booklet.

Getting the correct white balance settings on your camera is essential for showing the true colors of the things you’re photographing.   Getting the correct white balance is really, really simple, though.  All you need is a sheet of thick white paper.

Place the paper in the area where you want to photo your item, in the same lighting conditions that your item will have.  Figure out how to set the white balance on your camera, point the camera at the paper so that the white fills the screen completely, and set the balance.  That should do it!

It’s also important to make sure you have bright, white light for your lightbox.  Here’s how to choose a lightbulb.

!!! No matter what, make sure that the lightbulb you get is safe to use with your lamp!!!

This is the box for a 60 watt bulb. That's pretty bright for tungsten.

Check out the lightbulb box.  There will be an area that shows a number followed by lumens.  Lumens are the units that measure brightness – not Watts.  The 60 watt tungsten bulb above emits 825 lumens of light.

This flourescent bulb takes 20 Watts of energy but emits 1200 lumens of light.

As you can see, even though it only uses 20 watts, this flourescent bulb is much brighter, and is therefore a better choice.

The brighter the light, the richer the colors, and the more your items will stand out from the white background.  That being said, in a DIY home lightbox like this, it’s very hard to get a pure white background, and it probably won’t happen.

The thing you really want to avoid is photos with a cold or a warm tinge, especially if you’re working with a white background.  This immediately lets the person looking at your item know that they’re not seeing the real colors, and it doesn’t look at all professional.

Once you figure out your white balance, it’s time to think about setting up your photo.

One of the things that’s important when photographing an item to sell is to give the buyer an idea of how big the item is.  Sure, you can measure it and write down “15 cm x 45 cm”, but that sort of thing is hard to visualize.  instead, try photographing your item with something else in the picture, as a visual point of reference.  Then the buyer can immediately visualize the real size of the item.

These are some of the things you can use as a point of reference.

Above are some good options for points of reference.  These things are things that exist everywhere in the world, and are more or less the same size everywhere in the world.  Dice or playing cards would also work well.

Below are some bad options.

These are some bad things to use.

Let’s take them each into consideration.

While it may seem like a good idea to use cutlery as a reference point, it comes in many different types and sizes.  There are salad forks, dinner forks, dessert forks… the list of forks alone is long.  And they’re all different sizes.  Plus, some people use chopsticks.

Figurines or statues are bad because there’s no way to tell how big the figurine is!

Chapstick is actually a prefectly fine choice, as lip balm exists pretty much everywhere.  But no matter what you use, make sure it’s clean.  The lip balm above is open, used and nasty.  It will reflect poorly on your item.

Buttons also come in many different sizes.

Coins!  It’s such a huge temptation.  I’ve done it before, and I see it a lot.  But is someone in Germany going to know how big an American quarter is?  Using coins as a reference point smacks of ethnocentrism a bit.  Don’t forget… it’s called the world wide web for a reason.  Needless to say, if you do use coins, make sure they’re clean.

Paintbrushes come in many different sizes…

Credit cards!  Yes, of course everyone has them.  They’d make a great point of reference.  DON’T put yours on the internet unless you want to have identity theft.  Business cards are just as common and much much safer.

Now on to displaying your item!

Earrings should really be shown hanging in at least one photo.

These earrings are hanging from an industrial-looking metal grid.

Displaying the earrings on cold, impersonal metal gives them a different feel than if I were to display them hanging from, say, lace.  The colors here are neutral, which allows the colors of the earrings to really pop.

Complementary colors, here.

Displaying your product against complementary colors can work too, but you have to be careful, because there is a danger of the item blending into the background a bit.  If you do use complementary colors, like blue on blue, try to make them darker or lighter than your item.  Tan looks great on brown, though they are both different shades of the same color.

Contrasting colors are another option.

Contrasting colors are a better option than complementary colors, sometimes.  Like neutral colors, contrasting colors can often bring out the colors on the item, and it creates a more colorful image than a neutral background would.

Scrapbook paper is great as a background.

If your item is translucent, you need at least one photo of the item on a white background, because having other colors beneath it will alter the colors.  But it doesn’t have to be just a flat white background.  I found this in the scrapbooking section of my local craft store.  Scrapbooking paper comes in a huge variety of colors, patterns, and textures, and makes a wonderful background.

Reference point! =D

Finally, you have your photo against your reference point.  The bright yellow measuring tape looks great against the blue and green earrings.

Or, of course, you could show your earrings just on a plain, seamless white background.

Earrings on white.

Well, that’s part one!  I hope it was helpful.  Next I’ll talk about taking photos outside of a lightbox, and editing your photos once you get them on your computer.

Ciao!

Pepper