I wish I could take photos like these

I just love these photos from Your Willing Skin on Etsy. I really wish I knew how to take photos like these. But alas, I'll just have to be content with ogling them.


They just capture the golden light so beautifully. The photographer, Eadaoin, also has a lovely blog called City of Blackbirds, with many more gorgeous photos that you can see here.

Being My Own Model

With cold weather and Christmas just around the corner, I finally decided it's time to get serious about photographing and listing all the scarves I've been making all year long (yes, I make scarves year round). Since I don't have a model or a dressmaker's dummy, I've tried photographing them lots of different ways (on tables, on trees, etc), but often they just look like something unidentifiable, or, in many cases, like a colorful roll of toilet-paper. Which is interesting, but not exactly what I was going for. Observe; my tree-model and toilet-paper roll pose:










So I finally decided it was time to bite the bullet and be my own model. My sister happens to be a really good photographer (unlike me) with a kind of fancy camera (also unlike me). So the other day, when the lighting seemed just right, we went out to the yard to take some photos.


I put on what I deemed a nice, but un-distracting top, surprisingly free from the bleach spots, stains, and holes that adorn so many of my tops, and what I thought were my nicest jeans. After seeing said jeans in photos, I think maybe I need some new jeans. Luckily, my top half was really all that was needed for most of the photos.


So then we got down to it, and just "standing" is actually a lot harder than I thought it would be. Because you have to stand without looking strange, or awkward, or like you're missing a limb... all these things. And my sister the whole time giving me helpful tips, like "you look really weird when you do that" and "get rid of that hand." Get rid of it?


Amazingly, a lot of the photos turned out pretty decent (after some photoshop magic to remove some "skin imperfections" that my sister's fancy camera picked up in superb and unforgiving detail).


By the way, did you know you can edit your photos for free on Photoshop. com? I just discovered this little miracle. I know there are a lot of free editing programs out there (I usually use Picasa) but none of the ones I've used so far have the touch-up tool that I found so helpful in evening out my skin tone. It was actually really therapeutic. Zap, zap, zap, zap! I wish smooth, clear skin were so easy in real life!