It’s New Year’s Eve already! What are you doing? I’m taking some time to think about the coming year and how I’d like to focus my art. The studio is getting a much needed sorting, organizing, thinning… the fiber stuff is getting thinned and packed away for another time. In 2008, I want to focus on my photography, digital work, and encaustic painting/collage.

Several months back, I tried photographing arrangements of things. I used a lamp shade as a light box and shone my home-improvement-store reflector lamps on the lamp shade sitting on a table with the camera pointing straight down through the top of the shade. It worked okay for single small objects, but I was never able to get the results I wanted with larger arrangements.

Thanks to my wonderful family, I have new studio lights! It’s a pair of Interfit lights, each with softbox and reflector. Each light head has 5 sockets for daylight flourescent bulbs. The bulbs can be turned on in any combination. (Click on the thumbnail for a larger image.)

These lights will be very handy for photographing my art. I had the darnedest time getting full, even, matching light with so many different light sources in my dining room for shots like this:

And, of course, the lights are perfect for shooting arrangements of things… I could (and probably have) spend hours arranging the tiny objects I’ve collected and photographing them.

So now, I’m off to organize my studio… :)