Updates

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Don’t It Figure?

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

I set up the sale, tested, retested, retested, even bought something from myself, and all was good. I logged out, shut down my pc, and left for vacation. 2 days in, I have all kinds of funk splashed across the top of my site, and I can’t even log into the admin side. Sure, I could open up the php files, but I don’t even know what php stands for, let alone what I would be looking at. Apparently, this isn’t an uncommon problem with the shopping cart plugin I’m using. But with a little research, and a LOT of help from Dave, I seem to have cleared it up…temporarily anyway. We’ll see if it sticks or not.

On the bright side, vacation is great, the weather is great, I’m finally getting a bit of a tan, and have some cool pics to share with you when I get back to the city. Till then…

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Notice Anything New?

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

Hopefully, not too much. I’ve been making some small, behind-the-scenes changes to the skeleton of the site. If all goes well, the only change that you should see is the new layout of my product pages. If you encounter anything funny, strange, or odd, please leave me a comment or email me and let me know, so I can fix it. Thanks!

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A Really Great DIY Project

Monday, August 4th, 2008

I don’t know why I never made one of these before, but it was definitely worth the $7 and the hour or so that it took. I’ve read this article before, and I’ve read countless times about the importance of using a light tent in macro photography. Now, I don’t consider what I do to be “real” macro work, but I do regularly take close-up pics of the things I’ve made. This, itself, can be the cause of some concern for amateur photographers, but when you add the reflectivity of the materials used in jewelry, it gets even more finicky. After a recent photography session with a pile of jewelry, I found myself on the verge of thrusting my camera through my monitor. All my pictures looked, to be polite, like crap. A few days later, someone, on one of the blogs to the left, linked to that article. I decided to give it a try. As I said, it cost a whopping $7, as I already had a box laying around that was the perfect size. After about an hour, I had my tent ready to go. I re-shot the items from before, and was amazed at how much better they looked.

Previous to using the tent, I was taping a piece of poster board to the wall, and photographing the item on that. Very similar in concept, but the results speak for themselves. For an idea of what I mean, click on my “Products” page above (right under the “Dan-Clark Designs” title) and scroll through the items. The first few items were taken the “old” way. Starting with the Large Cross, however, you can see the difference when using the light tent. The color is much more accurate to real life, the brightness/contrast is much more pleasing, and the photographs themselves required significantly less “touch-up” time before posting.

I also bought a simple tripod. I didn’t have the money to get a “good” one, but as I’ve read elsewhere, a less-expensive tripod is better than no tripod. Also, I started taking my photos using the auto-timer on my camera, so the picture is taken 2 seconds AFTER I press the shutter button. This way, all vibrations that could be caused by my “you’d-think-I-had-Parkinsons-but-I-swear-I-don’t” shaking are eliminated. I could instantly see the improvement in focus.

I still have a lot of items up at The Studios, but as I change them out I’ll also be updating the photographs on this site, so they will all look good.

I always love to get feedback and suggestions on just about anything I do. Do you have any ideas as to how I can make my photographs, my items, or my site look more professional, nicer, better, etc? Please either shoot me an email at dan@dan-clark.com or leave a comment at any time.