Back in March, I wrote a series of “how to” articles at www.ehow.com. So far, I have written 9 articles, but unfortunately, although they have been viewed over 900 times, I have earned a total of $4.76. Not a great investment so far! I haven’t given up on this, and have recently added a new article about how to take great photographs of jewelry. At some level this is passive income, as the articles continue to be viewed, but it is disappointing so far.
One of the tasks to be tackled in selling jewelry is how to photograph it in a way that brings out the shape and the subtlety of the piece. As mentioned below, Jacqui has started to create beautiful silver wire-wrap jewelry by carefully encasing a cabochon – a shaped and polished semi-precious gemstone – in intricately shaped sterling silver wire. My job is to photograph them for her on-line sales web site.
If you look at the site, we have followed the approach of three variants for each piece. One is a picture of a lady wearing the pendant to show how it looks against skin, the second is against a black velvet background to bring out the colors, the third is to show an out of focus pastel colored background with the pendant seemingly floating in mid air. This last shot was made by using a glass topped coffee table, with an impressionist print on the floor about 12 inches below, and the pendant on the glass. I used two flashes on each side of the piece, one firing through a white umbrella, one reflected back from a silver umbrella a little further away. They give a broad enough swathe of light to properly illuminate the piece and the poster on the floor. With an f/8 aperture, I get a shallow depth of field to give the background a nice blurred impression. The result is shown below.
I mentioned in a post in early April that I had tried a new venture – the creation of photographic templates for business cards. I had created 30 templates and spent time uploading them, but throughout the month – nothing! I checked today, and, finally, a sale of a business card. The one that sold is a nice sunset over rolling waves and I got $5 for the sale. Not a lot, but it was actually quite good fun making the templates and thinking of different designs that would work for a business card, and so I think I will try some more.
If you do this, the key is to think about where the text will fit – the site has quite a few variants and so there is going to be one that fits!
My wife has now started her own venture under the Backyard Productions LLC entity – the creation of unique sterling silver wire-wrap cabochon pendants. These start from ornate polished semi-precious stones – called cabochons – and then she created a supporting environment of sterling silver wire, holding and enhancing the pendant for a lovely necklace or brooch. We have opened a shop front on Etsy – 20c to list each piece and 3.5% of the sales price in commission. However, Etsy manages the payment, which is quite difficult for a small business in its early days. The site is at BackyardArtisan on Etsy.com, and we have also created a site showing all the variants available at Backyard Artisan
April has been another great month for sales of my photographs – $240 in sales. This was pretty evenly distributed around the main sites, with Shutterstock being the best at almost $90 in the month, helped by one sale at $28 on the last day of the month! This makes two months in a row that I have beaten the $200 mark!
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