Being on both side of the camera…. the making of new images for my Essex Crystals

So recent days found me in the garden inside my light tent (a small white tent shaped like a cube with an opening to stick your camera), covered in makeup, dressed up to the nines (from the waist up anyway) attempting to be on both sides of the camera at once.

I am pleased with the result, but I can honestly say that I have a renewed inderstanding of why you pay a professional good money to do this. Photographers everywhere, I salute you! For finished work, a professional really is the way to go. But for work in progress, it’s difficult to justify the cost. Also, it does give me a chance to experiment and find out how these pieces work on people.

The thing is, I felt that these pieces needed to be photographed as jewellery. It captures the weirdness, the scale, and a sense of how you might encounter them as part of a dynamic interaction with another human being and not an object on a plinth. So a model was needed, and the thing with me, is that I’m conveniently located and cheap.

These are some of the results. I felt that they should work as a collection, but I didn’t want then to be too samey, and they also needed to look great as individual pieces.

In the end I opted for three different garments and a few subtely different poses and gestures, and a couple of different backgrounds.

I am grateful I have a very good camera that I can connect up to my phone so I can see what I’m taking, and a range of tripods and camera stuff inherited from an uncle years ago. I’d have loved to be placed in more interesting surroundings, but these convex optical pieces just grab the light and reflections and won’t let them go, so only a light tent would do.

I had a lot of worries that my neck was too old and wrinkly for the task, but in the end I decided that this is me, plus you can do wonderful things with makeup, photo editing software and just the right twist of a neck!

I hope you like them. I’ll be posting each image separately with title and story, so watch this space.