Saturday 26 January 2008

365 / 160 - Violets and Camera Settings

We went to see some friends last night, so I took a few works-in-progress along with me in a little box and stitched away during all the chitchat. I was supposed to be finishing a batch of red teapots and embroidering lots of oak leaves but I got a little distracted by the temptation of a new idea - making a variation on the forget-me-nots brooch, with violets instead:
I think they look rather nice, the purple is a quite delicious colour and I'm already planning to wear this brooch on my favourite purple jumper. Violets always remind me of the Italian scenes in E.M.Forster's novel A Room with a View - during English Lit GCSE we had it drilled into us that Violets = Italy = Love - and I think they mean faithfulness.
I'm delighted with the photos of them, too (although my camera battery ran out before I got all the angles I wanted). I've been playing around with the white balance on my camera, with very satisfying results. My little camera does a wonderful thing where it measures the light and adjusts the white balance automatically, getting rid of that annoying blueish tinge and making the colours seem much more true. I didn't think to take a picture actually using the camera's standard settings for comparison, but here's the first picture I took - taken with yesterday's white balance settings - as an example of the blue tinge and the not-quite-right colours:
And then here's one with the white-balance corrected (and before I did any cropping and tweaking with my photo editor). Such a difference.
I'm also experimenting with a different backdrop for my photos. After trying out various colours backgrounds a while ago I've decided to stick with the clean crisp white, and the friends we visited yesterday kindly gave me a leftover white tile from one of their DIY projects to try out as a backdrop. I feel a photo-taking session coming on sometime soon...

2 comments:

Michelle Engel Bencsko said...

I'm forever adjusting my white balance- the light in my house is so varied and there's really no bright natural light. I usually have to some color correction in Photoshop.

Anonymous said...

Good words.