It's been an exciting year for Edward Bryan Photography in 2010; as well as acquiring some new and exciting equipment, I've made it pay for itself, and that was the challenge for last year. It was also important to see which area of photography I wanted to focus on, it was great to get the wedding, portrait and product photography last year and all were great fun and brilliant learning experiences.

There's even been interest in some landscape photos I've taken so I think I need to keep experimenting and exploring as many areas of photography as I can in 2011.

With all that in mind, I increase my focus on product photography this year, it was a great experience photographing for EJ Bespoke Furniture and I think it would be great fun to increase my experience in this field.

Part of that would be photographing smaller items and even very small earrings, as much as I like my Sigma 24-70 EX DG, it doesn't quite have the macro capabilities really tiny things call for. The ceramic bust above was a great size for the Sigma but the earrings were just a bit too small.

The three earring photos here required a different lens to the Sigma, I used a Tamron 70-300 DI because it has a higher magnification ratio of 1:2. It's actually quite a cheap lens that I bought with the Alpha 200 just so there was a zoom lens in my kit bag but I'm really glad I haven't got rid of it. As a zoom, it's not all that great and I tend to use the Minolta 70-210 beercan I have, but it focuses close for a zoom/macro and stopped out it's not bad at all. I've treated myself to Lightroom 3 over Christmas and that has no problems getting rid of chromatic abberations which this lens is a little prone to.

This set of earrings was from Pretty Scruffy in Chichester;

http://www.prettyscruffy.com/

They are very nice but as you can see, also tiny. That was a bit of a deliberate decision to make the picture hard to take. The one above just shows the earrings themselves but the one below is my favourite. I used a gold painted leaf from our Christmas decorations and it gives the picture a little bit of interest as well as helping with the scale.

These last two items are from an art trail we went to in Cornwall on our honeymoon, unfortunately I can't remember who made them but they are very pretty and as a mid-sized piece they were perfect for these example shots.

www.edwardbryan.co.uk