The past week is all a blur. I learned a lot. It was fantastically exciting, incredibly time consuming and often plain old tedious. It took two full days to take the photos with the exception of a few "how to" shots, but it took over a week to get the house ready.
I moved tons of clutter out of my studio, the living room, the kitchen and both of my kids rooms to prepare. A lot of which is still in the dining room.
Getting the composition of each shot was really interesting to me. The photographers take the shots, we all looked at them, rearranged the shots, took different shots of the same things and then when we decided on the ones we liked the focus had to be checked. This entails zooming way in on every pixel on the computer screen. The computer is attached to the camera so the pictures go straight there.
The lighting in my house is really not good at various times during the day, and we happened to pick two of the greyest days ever seen in Northern California. So, lighting the shots was a bit problematic. I thought it was very interesting to see how it's done though. Often the lights in the house were turned out as they turned the photos kind of yellowish. But then they use big pieces of foam board and a silver screen to reflect what light is in the room. I got lots of new ideas for taking my product pictures and learned a little bit about how to use my camera.
The photo above is the mess from cutting and arranging flowers to "style" the photos. Styling photos is more fun and way harder than I thought it would be. I sort of knew. But I didn't. Props for photos are super important so I spent a fair amount of time searching for those. Again, great fun, but also time consuming and somewhat stressful. But when you see how it all turns out, everything is worth it.
In the end, I think the photos are going to be beautiful. It's funny. I didn't picture the photos to be in my own home. I think it's that I feel slightly insecure and maybe a little exposed by the idea. But they are definitely going to be very much my style as we used mostly my own things.
That's it in a nutshell, really. I'm still processing that I actually wrote a book. So this was sort of an out of body experience. Maybe it will sink in when I see the book in stores... or maybe when my Mom sees the book in stores. (((Man! I so wish my grandfather were here to see it!)))
Recent Comments