This post is really more about knitting, than photography, but all the same I am pretty happy with these pictures... so I will post it on the photo blog.
I just finished my first baby-baby sweater, and I just LOVE this thing. This is a French sweater, called a "Gilet à Rangs Raccourcis" or GRR. It's for my new baby, utero name of "G3" I have been eyeing this pattern for awhile. It's written in French, so I had a friend translate it for me. I am often frustrated with buttons, so I took extra pictures of that area of the cardigan -- mostly so I can document stuff and learn.
I love the stitch pattern of this sweater -- just a normal garter stitch, but sideways. I love the colors of this yarn -- the overall rusty color, but if you look at some of the closeups, you can see everything from pale pink to a hazy grey/purple.
I had an extra foam board lying around, so I laid it flat on an armchair in front of my sliding glass door. The board was plenty big enough that I could get the whole sweater in frame with enough white margin to provide a fully neutral background. My only complaint is that the shadows are more obvious than I would like. "Sometime" soon (next week, if I am still pregnant), then I plan to build a DIY lightbox using one of the many tutorials that you can find these days. Then I'll be able to eliminate shadows, and will have no excuse for anything less than perfect knitting pictures. :)
I used mostly an f-stop of f/5.6. I have been finding that anything smaller (in number, bigger in aperture) introduces more blur than I would like in my knitting photos. In areas where I specifically want to highlight just a certain detail (like a button) or a stitch pattern, I switch to an f-stop of about f/2.0. I shot in manual mode this time. Normally, I would shoot in Aperture ("A") mode here, and just let the camera figure out the speed. I found, though, that the color of the sweater taking up such a large portion of the picture threw off the results of the meter. So I switched to manual mode, focused on a close area of the white board to figure out my shutter settings to go with my aperture, then shifted my camera to point at the area of the sweater that I really wanted to focus on and took the picture. This worked well.
I edited all but one photo in Picasa, using auto-correct functions, starting from the jpg files. It's a little too highlighted/saturated for my taste, however, it's sufficient for the time that I have. One photo (the one that is completely square-on of the whole sweater), I edited using the RAW processor in Elements. I feel like that one is the most accurate in terms of color. I think the best compromise with these photos, to get the most accurate color, would be to edit the jpgs in Elements. This would save the RAW processing step, and provide more editing range than Picasa (which can lighten but not darken easily???). Or, I could actually do the RAW edits as a batch instead of one file at a time. I'm not used to the process flows of either of the last two, though, so I fall back on old habits when my time is limited.
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