Photography for Knitters

This past weekend I took Gale’s “Photography for Knitters” workshop and it was great. I learned a lot especially about exposure, trying different backgrounds and how different photos look after you upload them to your blog. I wanted to upload a few photos untouched to showcase what I learned but as soon as I put them on flickr, they lost a lot of color. We didn’t get the chance to explore this much during the workshop but I noticed it immediately after I uploaded some photos. Check out the photos below:

The photo on the left is completely untouched but the color looks nothing like it did when it came out of my camera. I don’t think I noticed this before because I almost always upload my photos with the intention of editing them later in Picnik. The photo on the right looks almost identical to the original file on my computer but I boosted the color, contrast and over saturated it, like Gale suggested, before uploading it. Needless to say, I ended up editing the rest of the photos in this post.

EDIT 1/26: Now that I’m looking at these photos on my work computer, they look completely different which is a little disappointing. The photos I edited look over saturated but on my macbook they look fine. What do you see?

Up until this point, I hadn’t really considered backgrounds too much when shooting finished knits and yarn, I usually just try to find a good light source (which is also important, of course) and a plain surface. During out first hands on session we played around with different fabrics to create a background for small objects and yarn:

I never think to grab some fabric and throw yarn on top of it. Normally, I use my light box or clear off my kitchen table which, is the whitest surface in my apartment but this is way more interesting. Now I can finally use that fabric that I bought during my sewing phase. I also need to get my hands on my some black velvet:

It was fun to shoot just for the sake of shooting. Getting photos of my finished objects and yarn always stresses me out a bit because I focus on trying to get a good photo instead of having some fun with it. I’m looking forward to putting what I learned to use and getting a bit more creative with my knitting photography.

I took over 300 photos yesterday so I’m going to leave you with just a few that I like.

This is Rebecca’s Peaks Island Hood.

The hood of Becca’s Central Park Hoodie.