Crochet Monkey and Experimenting with a Light Box

I find that the hardest part of blogging is taking nice photos! I don't have a lot of opportunity for taking pictures in natural light and end up taking most of my photos inside, during the evening. This has led to a lot of yellow photos. I've been on a quest to create perfectly white backgrounds in pictures of my crochet projects for almost as long as I've been crocheting (about two years). Finally, I think I might have discovered the secret.

When I was complaining about the poor quality of my photos to a friend, she suggested that I make a light box. I had no idea what that was so I had to look it up. Luckily a light box is very simple to make at home. I found this tutorial online. I used a cardboard box, white bin liners and a large piece of white card to make my light box. It took less than an hour to make.

Unfortuntely a light box isn't all you need for taking pictures with a nice white background. Unless you are lucky enough to have the perfect conditions, the pictures will require editing in a photo editing program. I used a combination of picasa and gimp. Both are free programs that you can download. I used picasa for altering the lighting in the image and gimp for erasing any unwanted shadows around the edges. After uploading the pictures into this blog post I can see that I didn't put enough time into editing the photos... you can see where I've erased the darker blue colour from the background. Ugh, not very pretty. The photos below are a lot better.

Even though I clearly need to work on editing the images I'm really happy with how they came out. They are a big improvement on the pictures I have taken in the past! The white background really helps to show off my crocheted monkey. The pattern is from zooimgurumi which is a lovely collection of animal patterns. I had to buy the book after seeing the adorable monkey pattern on the front cover. He's just so cute! The pattern is well written and easy to follow. I decided to make my monkey green because I didn't have any brown yarn when I bought the pattern book and I had to make him straight away :-P I don't think it detracts from he's cuteness though!