So Chase was supposed to have gone out of town this weekend, and I planned on a massive clean-up of my sewing room. My sewing room was a LITTLE messy after I got back from Dragoncon, but I dumped all my boxes and bins in there when we got home and it stayed like that. Then I had to dig stuff out for GMX and MCFC, and it made it like 5000x worse.
So my plan was to have Chase set up a little photography studio for me, so as I cleaned, I could take nice photos of my costumes on the dressform as I checked them over and put them away. Chase ended up staying at home this weekend, but he still sat it all up for me and stayed out of the way. I figured it would take all day, but little did I know…
The day got off to a rough start already when, first thing in the morning, Indy peed her bed and then puked all over the floor. I got going around 10 or so, got everything set up and going. Then Indy peed her bed again and the cat wouldn’t leave the backdrop alone. Then the dressform broke (the pole was already broken a bit, but the top of it cracked and broke even worse than it had been). Then the lighting got off and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it – Chase had gone out to do some filming and I had to call him to try to get it fixed.
By 6pm, I still was nowhere near finished, was aching all over from moving boxes and struggling with the dressform, and there had really been absolutely no “cleaning” done. I was hurting all over and tired, so I just shoved everything back in my office and called it a day. So now, my sewing room is in even WORSE shape than it started.
I did manage to shoot around 35 costumes…… unfortunately, I was really unhappy with the finished products!!
The problem is two fold – firstly, I should have used the wider backdrop. The short one was not wide enough to provide a decent background and I’m having to stretch the background from one of the test shots in and try to blend it to make it look right, which in some cases it doesn’t. Secondly, the photos just don’t have the detail I wanted. The sharpness and clarity is just not there. I wanted to be able to take a crop of, say, Anne Boleyn’s neckline to show the work there, and there’s not enough information there to do that, unless you want a picture of a blur.
So, Chase has promised me we’ll set up the bigger backdrop one day soon and we’ll do it all over again, and he’ll be on hand to make sure everything turns out the way I want.
I’m still going to use the photos I took on Saturday, because after all that work (and the fact that I’m still sore TODAY! I guess I need to exercise more.) I’m not going to just dump them.
Some of them turned out nice, anyway.
