I decided about a week ago to open my first vintage shop. I’ve been collecting vintage for a while and with our move to France – a magnificent treasury of great vintage items opened up before my eyes. And since I’m unable to leave items in the shop when I see something fantastic, I decided to open a vintage shop. With opening a vintage shop I am learning a few new things. First of all photography. I wanted to do something special with my shop photography wise – and since most shops use white backgrounds – I decided to go for a dark background. Which has been more challenging for me than expected, but I loved how the photo’s worked out after the first photo shoot. When I posted some previews, people started posting some tips and tricks based on my first photo’s and Karin from RolingOntwerpt did not only give me some tips an tricks about photography, she immediately also gave me an example of how she improved one of my pictures. You can see my initial picture above and her improved picture below.
Karin convinced me that darker backgrounds would work better – which I also kind of wanted to make in the first place – but unfortunately I was unable to make it work with my simple imac tool. So I had to start working with Photoshop, or Gimp or Pixlr and I just did . Karin explained what she did and I just replicated her steps. You can see the original pitcher picture above and improved one below – it’s difficult to really see the difference with this one, since the pitcher has a very neutral tone. I’m not sure why I haven’t used these tools before – it’s not too complicated. Probably you just need to use the tool the first few times in a very specific way where you follow a very simple step by step tutorial so that you build up some confidence. Which I’m trying to build up now.
So I’ll spend some daylight time the upcoming week on photographing all the items and editing the pictures. Next step in this learning curve is understanding where I can find the most comprehensive information about vintage items (period, producers etc) and the last step will be writing up some inspiring descriptions. Hopefully by the end of march all this will be done for the first batch of items. Curious? Keep an eye on this page for the launch announcement.
