tinahdee

You get to know yourself pretty well when you’re your own boss. If I was going to give myself a progress report today, here’s what I would put in the “needs improvement” section.

1. Planning ahead! Right now I should be figuring out what new items I want to have that could have a special theme related to the holidays. I’m good at being aware of that need, but execution is difficult for someone like me who flies by the seat, if you know what I mean. I’ll tell myself every day that I need to do it, right up to Black Friday….

2. Expanding my line in obvious and important ways. For every one of my wedding bands, I should design a matching band in a narrower or wider width so that shoppers can buy the set. Also, I need to create samples of my sterling items in other metals like solid gold. Again, I can tell myself this a million times, but doing it comes much harder.

3. Designing better record keeping systems. I’m not sure I can be of much help to myself here. I think it requires going for outside help. I am just not wired for this kind of thing, and I know it. The required action here would be to take the steps necessary to get help.

4. Taking better care of myself physically. I’ve been working on this one and feel pretty good about my successes here – BUT, I really need some prescription eyeglasses and I have been majorly procrastinating on that – probably because I can’t just take care of this issue by myself. The reading glasses have been great for a long time, but are just not cutting it and my arms definitely are not long enough…

Personalized Sterling Dogtag Bracelet

If your photos are a bit flat or if you’ve been told you need to “brighten up” your product pics, you might need to adjust the highlights and shadows. Don’t worry, it’s easy if you’re using the free photo-editing software called Picasa.

Open your image in Picasa. Click on the Tuning tab. You’ll see four sliders, a color picker, and under that, a colored graph called a histogram. The histogram shows the distribution of light and shadow in your photo. With the sliders above it, you want to even up the distribution as much as possible, so that in your photo you have “high” highlights and “low” shadows, giving the image depth and making it “pop” from the screen with lifelike clarity.

It’s easy – while looking at the histogram, move the sliders for highlights and shadows over until each side of the histogram is stretched out to the edge of the graph. Check the photo and make sure you don’t have too much highlighting or shadow and adjust the sliders as necessary.

Notice how your picture comes alive with this easy technique?

Gold and silver stacking rings

For the past couple of months, my husband and I have been getting up early and walking the neighborhood. Early! Before dawn. That’s the only time during the Florida summers that you can go outside and not melt. As we walk, we talk about whatever comes to mind – the issues of the day, family, funny things we’ve heard. It’s become a great way to get our day going the right way with togetherness and exercise. It’s hardly ever easy to get up that early, but it’s always worth it when we do. Our dog Elby loves to walk with us. I think its his favorite part of the day, except on the days he gets to have peanut butter for his treat.

Your product description is important for different reasons. You should include certain elements in your description in order to glean the most benefit from it.

Tiny Details: On Etsy, the product description is where your customer finds out important information about the item specifications: how heavy is it? what are the measurements? is it available in different sizes? can it be customized? So make sure you take the time to measure your item, describe the weight and feel, and spell out any options that are available.

Search friendly: The description should also be a rich repository of relevant keywords so that buyers can find your item easily and it shows up higher in search results, both on Etsy and search engines like Google.  Make sure that your keywords occur early in your description. Choose certain keywords that are descriptive of the product and your shop in general. For example, one of favorite keywords is “rustic”. It describes my jewelry well, and helps people find me. I try to include this keyword in most of my titles and descriptions. A general rule of thumb is that you should repeat the most important keyword that is in your product title, in the first sentence of your product description. If my item is titled “Rustic Sterling Silver Stacking Ring”, then I begin my description like this: “I handforged this rustic sterling stacking ring and added oxidation to bring out the details.” Wow, I got almost the whole title in there, and it doesn’t sound fake or forced. Google will like that.

Your Vision: If you have an artistic vision for the product, you should include it in your description. Make sure it is from the heart, and your story will resonate with the right people. For example, my brass stacking “Redemption” rings have an interesting and true story that have persuaded many buyers to get the ring because they identify with the story. One customer fighting a deadly and rare disease purchased my Braveheart ring in part because of my vision for the ring. Don’t make up a story just to make one up – that’s not compelling to the buyer and it is easy to see through. It’s better not to force yourself to make up a backstory. I don’t include an artistic vision on every product, just on the ones that are clear and obvious to me.

Suggestions: Buyers appreciate usage and customization suggestions, so include them in your description and even if visitors don’t read your description, the keywords will be searchable. You’re not supposed to include suggested uses in your tags, but there’s nothing wrong with putting them in the description. Often I’ll include sample personalization ideas in the description and buyers will use those ideas. This makes the buying decision easier, and that’s a good thing for you.

Link back to your main shop page: I include this on every product. That way if a buyer lands on your product page from a search engine or an inward bound link, it’s easier for them to find and *stay in* your shop, as opposed to going right for the orange box at the top of the page (that links to the main page of Etsy). I’ve read in the forums some opinions that Google Shopping frowns on links in the product description, but I’ve been doing this for over a year and have not experienced any problems. Your mileage may vary.

As you can see, your product description is really important. The time you spend crafting a well-written description is worth it.

Rustic Braveheart Copper Ring

Looking back I realize more and more what a rough patch I’ve been through over the last two to three years. You could call it inner turmoil, I guess. And I knew at the time that things were not the greatest in my life, but I didn’t begin to understand the depths of that until I started to come out of it. I’ve come to understand more and more what the jewelry making has meant to me in one of the darkest places of my life.

Before I started making jewelry I was working full time as a freelance journalist specializing in enterprise technology. For about a decade I wrote about things like open source software, corporate servers, and the like. I’m a writer at heart – I always have been and I always will be. But writing about technology is not something my heart desires. I did it for the money, and that’s all. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – I’d daresay most of us work solely for the money and if we had the choice we’d not be getting up each morning and heading for our current job.

Jewelry making came to me in an unexpected way. I’d never made jewelry before, never had the desire to, and if you’d asked me I would have told you that I didn’t even have an aptitude for stringing beads attractively, let alone cutting, hammering, soldering, and melting metal. I didn’t like power tools or getting really dirty. But today, those things are my daily work and right now, they are where my heart is, and they are where my healing is. Jewelry making has literally been an unexpected lifeline out of the pit for me. And let me be clear: writing about technology wasn’t what put me in a pit. No, it’s much more complicated than that – and some of you might think it’s much sillier. And now that I am climbing out of the pit, I can see a bit better what put me there, and I can talk about what being there was like, and what it is like to see daylight again.

Where my heart is

I’m back today with more tips on what works for me in product photography, specifically for jewelry. Sellers are always asking for advice about how to get more people to buy what they’re selling. Photos have to be one of the most important, if not THE most important details. You could have the best product on the Internet, but if your photos don’t reflect that, you probably are not going to be able to twist someone’s arm to buy your stuff.

Last time I talked about lighting. This time I want to share my thoughts about settings and background. In an effort to dress up their photos, sellers will place items on busy backgrounds like patterned paper, or surround the item with foliage or flowers. This rarely works well because in order to draw someone in to your shot and coerce them to click through, your product needs to be the most important thing in the picture. I heard someone say that your item needs to be the star. With small items like jewelry, that is especially true.

There should be no doubt in the shopper’s mind what you are selling. That doesn’t even mean that the entire piece needs to be inside the boundaries of the photo – sometimes it’s better if you leave a bit to the imagination. What is means is that there should be nothing else in that photograph that distracts your buyer from the item you are trying to sell. Nothing.

Simple is better. It’s good sometimes if your background has some texture, but not too much texture. Color, but not too much color.  Definitely not too much of both.  I use tumbled marble tiles for a lot of my photos. They have a lot of texture but very little color, so it works.

If you are showing your item on a human model, the rules are a bit different. If the model is attractive, this can work in your favor for getting clicks and it doesn’t matter quite as much if your item is competing with the model for attention. Get them to click and then you can show them more details about the piece you’re selling.

Renaissance Pattern Wedding Set

In the time that I’ve been selling on Etsy, I’m not ashamed to say that my product photos have improved tremendously. Could this be part of my selling success? I think so. I see a lot of items on Etsy that are not presented in a way that shows their true beauty. A clear, properly lit, beautifully staged set of photos makes your item come alive to the customer. I have some definite opinions about what it takes to make a great photo, and I’m going to share them with you. I’m sure not everyone will agree, and there are many people who successfully use techniques other than the ones I do. But if you like my photos and want to emulate this style, here’s how you do it.

Note: My jewelry business was launched with hardly any cash outlay, so another benefit to my favorite method of getting the product shoot is that it is very inexpensive.

Natural Light

The most important element to taking a great jewelry photo is lighting. I am a proponent of natural light, the kind that comes from the sky. For one thing, it’s free. You don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on bulbs, light stands, light boxes (even homemade ones take cash), diffusers, or any other kind of equipment. All you need is the outdoors, or my favorite, the ubiquitous window sill. No exposure to the elements required!

When I first began taking photos of my jewelry, I did what most people do. I placed the jewelry in an attractive setting like an embroidered tablecloth or a beautifully printed piece of paper, turned the lights on, zoomed in, and clicked. Unfortunately, this method produced washed out photos with a lot of glare.

Washed out, with glare

It didn’t take me too long to figure out that this style of photography wasn’t going to cut it. As beautiful as my renaissance crown might have been, looking at this picture you’d really have to use your imagination to realize it. Not only is it washed out with a harsh glare – it’s out of focus and the background is way too “busy.” (More on that in another post.)

Next, I moved on to outdoor photography. This worked OK for some things, but I was having the hardest time getting a good shot of say, shiny silver items. This was because I was setting my item in direct sunlight – not a good plan for bringing out the texture and details of your piece. The key to good lighting is to have some light and some shadows – but neither of these should be harsh or hard. Harsh light washes out or causes glare, and hard shadows obscure parts of your photo or cause a distracting extra shape in your composition. The solution to this is to use bright, but diffused light.

Bright light from the sun is perfect, but it needs to be diffused. This is what makes a cloudy day ideal for taking photos of your jewelry in natural light. The harsh glare of direct sun gets eliminated, and so does the hard shadow. Everything is softer and more subtle, which focuses the attention on your jewelry instead of other distracting elements. So when there’s a cloudy day in the forecast (for some people this is every day!), take advantage of it to get some great shots.

What if you need to take picture and it’s a sunny day? There are many ways to use the bright light of the sun while avoiding the harshness of its rays. One way is to take pictures in the shade. Make sure your shade is consistent and not dappled like the effect you get under a tree. Dappled light will just make your photo dappled. Find some good shade and then experiment with pictures. Sometimes bringing the item right to the edge of the shade will provide a good balance of light and shadow, while shooting your piece in shade that is too deep can result in a flat, dull picture.

Another sunny day solution is to use the window sills in your home. If you’re lucky, you have sills on more than one side of your home, which allows you to use different ones depending on the light levels and the time of day. Window sill photography is my favorite method for getting the lighting just right. For example, I have a sill in my bedroom that is perfect for getting dramatic shots when the sun is just coming up.

Dramatic morning light

The picture above was taken with no flash, just the diffused, interesting light from the early morning sun.

Other sills in my home give me good results in the afternoon and evening. If you have a large window that allows a lot of light in, you can even move your shots further away from the window and experiment with light balance that way. Whatever you do, don’t use your flash! Find out how to turn it off and then keep it off. If your photo comes out too dark, you just need to move closer to your natural source of light.

Next, I’ll share some of my tips for getting a good background.

I wonder why they call it a wedding ring. After all, you don’t wear it only on your wedding day, like your wedding dress. A wedding ring is something that many people never ever take off. They should call it a marriage ring. Right?

The picture below is my marriage ring. It used to be my wedding ring. It was your average domed band made of gold – I think we got our rings at JC Penney or Sears. We were definitely looking for budget friendly stuff. Nothing original about that.

But of course many years later, I have learned how to do stuff to metal and make jewelry out of it. And one day, I took my wedding ring and made it into my marriage ring. I put it on the steel mandrel and hammered it all over, creating facets and tool marks on it. Instead of a plain jane standard issue wedding ring, I now had a one of a kind marriage ring. It represents to me all the things we have weathered together in our 17 years of marriage. Each blow of the hammer makes the ring more beautiful, just like our marriage. Every difficulty we have faced has made our relationship what it is today – a beautiful work of art.

Have you ever heard someone say that? It’s in reference to stuffing something inside you – something you’re trying to avoid or deny or hide or run from instead of dealing with.  The harder you stuff it, the more like it is to “come out sideways” as some form of alternate expression.

I think that’s why I make jewelry. It’s my writing, coming out sideways.

I’ve been writing since I could hold a crayon. It’s just what I do. Over the last five years of my life I have been writing less and less. Between mid life crises and dealing with the emotional rollercoaster of adult children leaving the nest, coupled with some serious dysfunction issues from my childhood, I’ve been stuffing the writing.

You see, writing opens a channel from the depths of my heart and puts the contents therein on display to myself and to the world (should I choose to share my words that way). And sometimes, it’s just too hard to look and see what’s in there. There’s something in there that even to this day I am afraid to identify and face. And I know that the more I write, the closer I get to staring that thing down, whatever it is, face to face.

A couple of years ago, in the zenith of my despair, I put away a few things that were just too painful to carry. One of those things was writing. For all the joy and insight it brought to me and I daresay to at least one other person, the corresponding threat of pain was too risky. I didn’t realize at the time that was why I couldn’t do it anymore. But it is very clear to me now.

The jewelry making is the writing, coming out sideways. Hammering and burning and bending the metal is a non-verbal channel to my heart, which makes it easier for me to deal with then the words. The little pieces of body adornment that result are really little pieces of my heart.

One of the ways I can recognize that the jewelry-making is a direct line to my heart, is that I always end up with irrational fear surrounding the things that open up my heart. I start practicing avoidance – I find a dozen other things I need to do first, before I go out to the workshop and start creating.

And I have found a billion things to do now, before sitting down to write the things that are in my heart. Ironically, though, the very reason I find myself writing on this clear cold morning is because I am avoiding my other heart activity – making the jewelry. Funny. But hey, whatever works.

And now, because I have a commitment to the people who have chosen to put their trust in me and express their appreciation of my craft, I’m heading out to the workshop to do something I love very much.

truth

Winner of the dogtag bracelet is Kelly, who had three entries, one of which was the 6th, which is what the random number generator at random.org gave me this morning.

Kelly

Posted November 23, 2009 at 1:23 am | Permalink

I am a social worker and work with children and families who have had their child removed for one reason or another. I see a lot of pain and sadness throughout the day, and while it can be really hard, the joy of seeing family succeed is so amazing. I would choose the bracelet and get “Hope Never Dies” inscribed. All these families need is hope that life can be better for them.

And the winner of the ring, whom I chose myself, is Laura.

Laura

Posted November 24, 2009 at 4:31 am | Permalink

I would love to win the ring. If I were to win I would like MOON inscribed on it as my niece always tells me she loves me to the moon and now being on the other side of the world from her, it would make me feel slightly closer to her.

Congratulations to both of you! Kelly and Laura, please get in touch with me at tinahdee <at> gmail.com to let me know your address, and in Laura’s case, your ring size.