When I started my business nearly forty years ago, I’d already been making jewellery for a decade or more. Most of these pieces were lost in the mists of time, so when the time came to set up the bizz, I vowed to archive an image of each subsequent piece for my own records as well as, I suppose, posterity.

This was, of course, back before any digital solutions existed, so I was compelled to use the technology available. Fortunately, my beloved had, while studying for her journalism degree, procured a lovely Nikon 35mm SLR camera which was now gathering dust and just itching to get back to work. She allowed me to fulfill its ambitions.

I picked the brain of the professionals at the nearby camera-store  (remember camera stores?) for information and bought a good-quality macro lens suitable for close-up work of the kind I envisioned. A small tri-pod and a cable shutter-release pretty much blew the remainder of my camera budget and I was ready to waste some film (remember film?).

After much experimentation, which was tedious and expensive, I worked out a bone-headed technique for getting clean shots of small, shiny things. This involved setting the aperture (f-stop?) as small as possible to ensure decent depth-of-field, and the shutter to auto. An  important consideration as my first shop was dismally under-lit, so snapping a photo involved getting the piece as close as practical, getting it in focus, and snapping the shutter open. Then going and making myself a sandwich or something. The exposure time for what was, in effect, a pin-hole camera was impressive.

The pictures turned out well enough for my purposes, showing good detail without any artistic fooferaw. I consider them more like autopsy photos than art.

There was no way I was going to get any more involved in the developing and processing of the film, so it was off to PhaseTwo Photo with my little canister of film and a couple days wait to see if my pictures had turned out. The suspense was killing.

When I got the prints back, I’d stick them into photo albums loosely organized into categories like Engagement Rings, Wedding Bands, and of course, Remounts, my bread-and-butter. This formed the seed of my eventual digital database, which was pretty much science-fiction at this point. I made a funky little menu as a guide for customers and I was on my way.

I did try to organize the negatives in a more-or-less chronological fashion by putting them in separate albums and making contact sheets of each page. We’re talking tedious stuff here, kids.

The photo albums served as a great sales-aid, as customers could peruse the pictures and tell me which pieces appealed to them and which most emphatically didn’t. Based on their feedback, I would come up with designs that would, with any luck at all, please them enough that they would give me money.

With the advent of of digital photography, the system has been greatly simplified. My best guess as to the number of photos in the system, analog and digital combined, is over ten thousand. This includes several views of some pieces, but it’s still a helluva bunch.

Thanks for reading.