I decided that the store needed more items in the "silver" category, and I started to dig through some of storage boxes to see what I could discover. Silver plate, sterling, we got it! And my strategy now is to take the pictures first, so that when I've done the research and written the descriptions, I've got the item ready to pop into the store's inventory. Sounds like quite the system, right? And I'm this nascent photographer, with my little portable light studio and my digital camera ready to take aim...
But silver shines. Boy, does it shine. I kept taking pictures of me taking pictures of the silver. And the resolution is so great that when I uploaded the photos, I realized that some of the pieces were rather, er, careworn, shall we say - that is, I saw lots of little scratches that I hadn't noticed before.
The piece that defeated me, though, was a reproduction creamer, whose handle looked kind of tarnished. Wanting to show it off to its best advantage, I whipped out my trusty Goddard's silver polishing cloth (what a great product, BTW), and gave the handle a brisk rub. CLUNK! Guess what disengaged itself from the creamer - the tarnished handle! (Maybe that's why it wasn't polished in the first place?)
I guess I'm glad that it happened, because I would have hated for the damage to have occurred during shipping to a customer. I certainly didn't know there was a problem with it before I started this exercise, but now I'm relegating that particular item to the "garage sale" pile, since I'm not prepared to get into the silver repair business at this point...
At the end of this day, I didn't have enough pictures that I was happy with to justify adding more "silver" items to the store inventory. I'll have to do some more practicing with my camera, and with the lighting. Here's a picture that turned out OK, but I didn't get enough other angles to be able to present a good overall impression of the piece. If it's not good enough, it won't go in - and I'm sticking with that story!
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