Fishing for TreasureAdventures in Junk

Buying and Selling Antiques and Collectibles can be fun if you are adding to your collection and profitable if you are buying for resale.

Bill and I set out exceedingly early one Saturday to visit a flea market far out in the country and sell a couple of black powder long guns. He used to collect them, but got tired of pouring powder or biting cartridges or whatever the obsolete operating system was.

Now, it’s getting more difficult to sell firearms at most flea markets. In between the folks who test the product by firing over the heads of the crowd, and the ones who peddle illegal stuff out of their trunks to finance their favorite kinds of mayhem, the markets have gotten pretty skittish about weapons.

I was wanting to photograph some vintage earrings for sale. Jewelry is a real challenge for the amateur product photographer because it’s small, it’s shiny, and you want the pictures to be very focused and detailed. And beyond that, you want them to be gorgeous, and three-dimensional, and to look so real that the viewer will fall in love with the earrings at once and cash in her kids’ college funds to possess them.

And you don’t want people to see the teeny tiny little images of your elbows and camera reflected in the surface.

So I looked around for a studio. The sewing machine cabinet is covered up right now, so I decided on the old oak wash stand in the living room. I hung a white sheet from the towel rack, carefully smoothing and curving it to give that “endless horizon” invisible look to the background. Then I tossed down some earrings and took a practice shot, with the camera set to the largest image.

Now, Bill has never been afraid of snakes. Family lore has it that as a boy he went on missions to clean water moccasins out of the swimming hole. He would lay out fishhooks and lines on the bank to capture them, and then string the trophies together to impress the other kids.

I only heard of him bringing a snake into the house once. It was a copperhead in a jar. He’d decided to keep it in his room. Luckily, his Dad found it before his Mom did. If it had been the other way around he’d have likely finished his childhood in military school.