I’m just about to start on the enormously long slog of processing all the pictures to add new items to the shop. I spent all of yesterday photographing them and all of this morning editing the photos. When I say editing, I really mean choosing between multiple copies and possibly enhancing the light in the chosen pictures. I can’t zoom in on the subject because then when I submit the photograph to the multi stage zooming programme, it wouldn’t work. Neither can I alter the colours, enhance any areas or do anything to change the photo from the natural appearance of the original item; it has to arrive in your hand looking as much like its photograph on your screen as is possible.
For example if you have fallen in love with the breeches man
to be exact, the undressable breeches man
cor, then you’ll want him to be just the way you see him.
One of the reasons I’ve taken a whole day to photograph 31 items is that I have a new camera. I have been months choosing, partly because I’ve had to save up; my old camera has kept working, thank goodness, but only just. I was hoping it would keep going while I did some window shopping. Most of the latest, greatest digital cameras have face recognition features, not just to recognise that you have facial features but to improve them. Whether or not you wish to make your friends all look like movie stars is questionable; I’d have thought a really popular camera would be the one that can make selected photographic subjects (the owner of the camera, for example) look taller, slimmer and more glamorous than other people in the picture. A camera that squattified, fattened and aged friends and gave enemies luxurious black nose hair and bottoms the size of the Isle of Wight would be impossible to keep in stock; it would be the number one Christmas present until someone figured out a way of projecting the results back into reality and fixing them there.
All of which is precisely what I didn’t want in a camera for photographing dolls. They have to be exactly as you see them. This, of course, is one of the advantages dolls have over people; nature in all her surprising variation doesn’t get a look-in. Dolls are cursed or blessed by their looks from day one, which come to think of it, is like people after all.
So I shall now get busy with the convoluted programmes. leaving you a peek at things to come, such as my first flexible 48th scale man:
some other small folk:
one or two paintings
and a few twelfth scale people.
So I’d better get busy with them and I’ll let you know when they’re ready for you to visit them in the shop. A couple of sleeps, maybe less if I get busy.
JaneLaverick.com – more technology than you could programme a stick to shake itself at.