Something About Nothing

My friend, Dawn, and her sister inhereted a very large collection or fossils, crystals, minerals and rocks from their father.  They have sold as many as they can to local rock hounds and now Dawn has the enormous task of selling the remaining rocks online. Dawn's first problem was how to photograph the rocks in a professional way without buying a new camera or hiring a professional.  Immediately she and I thought of the ugly box I blogged about in 2009. Unfortunately I left my ugly box outside and it became extremely unusable so today Dawn & I built a new ugly box. And she is taking fabulous macro photos! The above crystal was taken with her camera phone!  Go Dawn Go! I took these two photos with my camera. Have you ever made or used a macro photo box?

I just found this wonderful website/blog which is full of beautiful antique and vintage images for mixed media artists.  The images are fun and lovely and FREE of any copyright restrictions!  Here are a few examples of images I thought were wonderful. . . Beautiful Daylilies I love these keys!  They would be so beautiful to use in printing or sun dying.  Such a sweet face!  There are antique photos of people too. And lots of lovely drawings of birds, butterflies and insects. So far I have downloaded 37 images.  I'm looking forward to using them someday soon. 

The other day when I was at Juliette 's house quilting she showed me her homemade light box. I was amazed that something so ugly could do such a wonderful job. So after a little research and finding some great instructions here I made one of my own: I used a box I found in the hallway at the gym where my daughter is participating in volleyball camp. The white paper on the sides is velum paper I bought on clearance a couple of years ago. The only thing I had to buy today was the 68 cent piece of poster board in the middle. I know I have some poster board downstairs but I wasn't sure if I had white so I splurged. And why would I care to have this 68 cent box? Because now I can take awesome professionalish photos like this:

Yesterday my husband and children put their busy lives aside to come with me downtown to have professional photos made. Over the years we have had photos made at Sears, Pennys , Kiddie Kandids and similar "studios." We have had a lot of mediocre photos taken at these places. One time the photos came back and one of the children was half way out of the photo! And the worst part was that we HAD to purchase them because my dear husbands parents were in them and they had returned to their home in another country. There was no way to redo the photos. It was terrible! We did have professional photos made once with a photographer who came to student housing. He actually took my favorite photo of our family so far. So why, you ask, do we keep going back to these barely adequate places? Well to be honest - It has always been about the money. This year is different. Our oldest child will be moving out of the state for law and/or graduate school soon and we decided it was time for some...