Taking Nice Photographs on a (Very) Tiny Budget

Shh, don't tell anyone I haven't post in a while! I have schoolwork and I'm a busy little bee. 

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That's a bumble bee :D

Anywho, today I decided I want to post about the way I personally photograph my items. I know there's a lot of tutorials out there, but they don't all work for everyone, so I thought I'd add mine to the mix. :) Hopefully at least a few people out there will find that this method works for them.

I'm poor. I refuse to go buy an expensive lightbox. So I scoured tutorials for photographing my pictures and tried a whole bunch of different techniques. I've tried laying my jewelry on rocks, on pretty cloth backgrounds, on boxes covered with white paper, on white vinyl out in the sun, and I've even tried making my own lightbox out of foamboard. I decided that I really like the look of the nice, clean white background with my jewelry. Some of my lightbox pictures came out very nicely, but a lot of other ones came out with awkward shadows on them, or didn't show the true color of the piece. I refused to post anything that didn't accurately describe my jewelry, fearing that buyers would receive something slightly different than in the photograph and would be unhappy with their purchase. The lightbox was also very big and bulky, which was a major drawback because I had very little room to store all my equipment.

I finally discovered that the perfect object for me to photograph on is a piece of foamboard. That's all. One  piece of foamboard.

I then used a yardstick to roughly plot out the middle of the foamboard widthwise and made a slice down the center, being careful not to cut the foamboard entirely in half.

Now it bends in half!

At home I have the lights that clamp onto something that I use to photograph with, but at school I have a lamp that I use.

And it folds in half for nice easy storage, so that there isn't MORE stuff around my room for my wonderful roommate to quietly seethe about. :D

Of course, for this to give you a perfect white background you must know how to adjust the white balance on your camera, and be able to edit your photos on the computer a little bit. I use iPhoto (I have a mac) and i adjust the levels so that the white looks whiter. :)

Hope this helps at least someone!