final photo shoot pictures

After months of building collections, experimenting with new products, prepping files for printing, printing and reprinting and reprinting files, researching product photography, brainstorming product photography, bugging all my friends for opinions multiple times, searching and purchasing styling pieces within some sort of budget, losing sleep over how to best style photos, figuring out what to photograph when, arranging gallery shots, styling two "rooms", hanging a fake gallery for 12 hours for just two photos, spending way longer than expected taking the photos on the cloudiest/rainiest day in all of Florida history, helping the photographer edit the photos, getting frustrated over the color and clarity of the photos changing for each website and platform, uploading the photos and writing this post..........(big breath and drum roll)..........THE PHOTOS ARE HERE!!!

Lessons Learned:
1) I am not a product photography stylist. It takes a certain skill that I just don't have, no matter how many articles I read or photographs I studied.
2) Michelle (my photographer) can work magic in Photoshop. Even after all my years of digital scrapbooking, I would never be able to do what she's done. You'd never be able to tell that it was extremely dark and stormy the day we took the pictures. Thank you a million times Michelle for putting up with my crazy.
3) Speaking of crazy, it's crazy how much work goes into what turns out to be 5 finished photos (not including all of the individual product photos). I will not be taking a job in magazine styling anytime soon.
4) Let it go. I finally had to give up on planning it all out perfectly and just go for it. I ended up nixing almost everything that I had planned for that day, just because in reality my ideas didn't work. So I spent months agonizing over something that I had to make up as I went along anyways. Despite all this, the photos turned out way better than I expected!

I'm working on uploading everything to Citrus and Mint Gifts, and when I'm done I'll be back with more to share on all of the new products I'm releasing. Here are some preview photos for your viewing pleasure.  Let me know what you think!