photo shoot at home revelations

i spent a super inspirational day on thursday, soaking up the talent, passion and advice of some amazing speakers at the Craft & Design as a Career seminar. the morning speakers were my favourite - designer beci orpin, ebony of hello sandwich, the editor of dumbo feather magazine and fashion designer alexi freeman - each sparking new ideas, getting laughs and blowing me away talent-wise, all the while seeming like nice, normal sort of folk.

one of the many, many things i took away from the day was a small tip from ebony on shooting photos at home. she showed a pic of the setup she uses, basically four sheets of white foam core forming a box with one side open to a window that gets good natural light. i'd heard tips about using white paper or sheets to bounce light before but for some reason seeing this simple setup, it finally clicked. i bought a couple of large sheets of super heavy white card stock today and had a play to see what kind of results i could get. my printing table actually gets great, indirect light during the day but it only reaches so far into the room, one side of my photos is always so much darker and it makes them hard to edit. so today i did a test shot, on my table across from the window, with light coming in from the right, as per normal:


and then the same shot as i held the white card on the left to reflect the light back across the fabric:


see how the shadows on the second photo are much lighter? it was enough to convince me.


i propped the same piece of card up against my sewing machine so i wouldn't have to hold it and positioned another on one side to reflect even more light and FINALLY managed to get some decent shots of my new prints so i can add them to my etsy shop. i edited them earlier this evening but when i went to upload, i discovered that etsy is down and they are working on resolving the issue... the new prints may be cursed...