Old and New Photos

I've finally finished retaking all the photos of my earrings with my new tabletop photo studio (aka the good lightbox). Still working on cropping them and replacing the old photos in the Etsy listings. Got one of them up yesterday; here's a comparison:

Old photo with homemade lighbox, in the garage which only has poor yellowish light (couldn't find enough light elsewhere that day):



Looks ok here, I suppose, but in the listing the photo is smaller and harder to see.

New photo with better lightbox, good lighting:


(Green and Yellow Byzantine Earrings)

Sort of looks darker, but also clearer I think. I think the darkness of it comes from the gray background vs. the white, and there's sort of a shadowy-ness in the first one which isn't really a problem in the second one. So basically, I think there's still something in my photography that needs to be improved, and I need to figure out exactly what to do about it, but the new lightbox is definitely better than the old one. In fact I usually have to iron out the crease in the background cloth before I can use it, but the old one had a seam between the two pieces of poster board (the box was too big for just one), which I couldn't iron out except with the smudge tool in Photobucket.

It seems like the photos with the earrings laying down are better than the ones with them hanging:


I think maybe that's because the two lights and the camera are all pointed down directly at the earrings, and when they're hanging on the display it's kinda difficult to get both lights on them evenly.

Actually the more I look at the old photo, especially comparing it to the new one, the less I like the old one. Maybe the new one could be a little clearer, but there's something really uncomfortable about the lighting in the old one. I think it's like a doctor's office waiting room. Ew I really need to replace the rest of those photos soon. Very sorry about that. It will all be fixed quite soon.