Stuff to remind me…

I was a bit bored this evening, so I decided to take out a couple of boxes of jewellery and play a little with the speedlite and the macro lens. I’m not very good at this sort of thing usually so it’s hard work for me to get anything back out of the shots.

Mostly, when I started it, earlier this evening, I wanted nice pretty little jewellery shots like this one:

which is nice, with lots of nice bokeh and shiney bits. It occurred to me as I dragged stuff out of the oldest of the jewellery boxes that while I don’t have lots of seriously pricy jewellery, I have lots of cheap stuff which has a far more valuable currency, and that’s memories.

So instead of doing a bunch of lousy product shots, I wound up shooting a story of parts of my life. I wear rings quite a lot – the ones I am wearing today I didn’t photograph. But others….

This I bought in a stall in Liffey Valley. The lable on the box is Quo Vadis. It’s a basic piece of costume jewellery that sit awkwardly around my neck. The last time I wore it was probably at a Christmas party last year.

This I bought in a stall at the central railway station in Milan. I think it cost about 6 euro. Italy is full of cheap junk jewellery like that – I’ve a bunch of others that I bought in a market in Rome for about 5 euro. I loved this although I think there’s some damage to it already. What I liked were the little hearts.

A lot of my favourite jewellery tends to be presents and this is one of them. It’s a pair of earrings bought by my niece when she was on holidays in Egypt a few years ago.

I think this belonged to my sister when she was a teenager. Loveheart knot rings were very common when I was about 8 and this one has somehow survived. The blue/silver earring below is in the same little ickle box that somehow passed into my possession when I was 16 years old.

This is another present from my sister, bought, I think, when I was 21 years old. I think she bought it in London around the same time as she bought the locket ring which has never had a photograph in it. Yet. And yes, the shot is a self portrait.

Two parts of my life here, well, three possibly. Hard to say in some respects. The treble clef was bought in a market stall in Covent Garden when I was out shopping with my cousin at some stage when she was a student nurse in LOndon and I had just finished my postgrad to be an interpreter. The crystals nearly all of which have separated from their settings were bought variously in Germany when I was 18 or in Brussels when I was 25. The stone with the bit of opal in it was bought in a mineral fair in Brussels. I bought other things there; I used to like going to mineral fairs like that. I have some moonstone from that day somewhere also. In the background, outside the sharp focus you can see a ring which my niece made for me when she was about 14 I think. There is also a blue earring which was a present and I think it might have been my niece again.

Interestingly enough, most of the stones that come my way tend to be vaguely blue in colour. I wonder sometimes if that says something about me.

This is my favourite photograph of the set. The ring is from Folli-Folie and was bought in the branch in Paris although I have another 3 rings which were bought in Athens that made it into the shoot but not onto the web. I need to clean my silver jewellery. All of it.