It's wedding season...

and I recently had the pleasure of meeting a lovely lady called Debbie, from who makes absolutely exquisite, sculptural wedding bouquets, corsages and button holes from vintage jewellery, silver wire and other found objects. Here is a detail of one of her bouquets...

The amount of work that must have gone into such an intricate piece is breathtaking!
You can visit her etsy shop here. Having seen her work in the flesh, I can honestly say that the photographs do not do her work justice. There was a delicate sculptural elegance to every piece I saw, and I hope she can find a way to truly capture that in a photograph.
We discussed working together and the possibility of my making some components for some of her pieces, and it was great to experiment with the idea. Here's a little glimpse of a couple of experiments I made with that in mind.



I love the delicate effect of the porcelain on these lilies, and they were great fun to make too.

Choosing a camera for product shots

I hope you all had a lovely Easter! My new camera finally arrived yesterday. I say finally, as it has taken a very long time... I can't blame this on the supplier, as they were very quick to deliver, rather it took me a very long time to choose. I finally decided on the canon ixus 100is, because it came out well in tests on its macro, colour faithfulness and performance in low light. I read lots and lots of reviews, and decided I wanted a point and shoot, because I really don't often use the manual settings on my old camera. I also wanted a tiny one that would fit into a small bag or pocket. The other consideration was that it had excellent automatic focus. I drove myself insane with reviews, which guides etc, until finally I headed over to flickr.com
There are groups for pretty much every type of camera there, so it was helpful to see what other people had taken using my shortlisted cameras. Anyway, the Ixus (or powershot as it is known in the states) won, and arrived today.
Today it was finally warm enough to step outside without a big coat on, so I decided to explore the garden and take a couple of shots as it was a reasonably bright afternoon.
My favourite was this one of a ladybird...

Considering how tiny it was, and what a breezy day it was too, I think the shot came out pretty well. I liked that I could even see the pollen in the centre of this flower on the next photograph...



After that I took a couple indoors, to see how it did with colour faithfulness. It is really important to me that this is right. I had a camera a while ago that was frankly a nightmare for that. I had to edit every single photo because the colours were so different on the photos. As you can imagine, that was a very time consuming process. Here's a shot of some children's fake flower garlands, taken in the same conditions that I take my product shots...


The colours are nice and bright, but also they are very very close to the actual objects. So far, so good! Fingers crossed it will do a good job of my product shots. After a lovely hour experimenting with my new tool (or playing with my new toy, depending on how you look at it) I had shelves to put up and a kiln to unload... The shelves are necessary as I will need more drying space to make the required work for my upcoming exhibition at the end of this month... Well they are up, and looking very long and empty. I'd better go and fill them or there will be no exhibition! Watch this space for more details and wish me luck :)