You have a good chance of encountering bins of goods for sale when you’re traveling. They often make interesting subjects for a pocket camera photo. The photos are colorful, make interesting texture patterns, and provide something to ponder when you return home and have the time. There is more to see in the photos than you had time to contemplate on the spot.

Jewelry bin at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show.

A larger version is here.

My examples in this post derive from the Tuscon Gem and Mineral Show earlier this year. It is an annual event in which about 3000 gem and mineral dealers converge on Tucson, Arizona, to replenish each others inventories, and to sell to the general public. There are large tents devoted to sellers of beads, for example, as just part of the gem and mineral business that includes precious and semi-precious gems, mineral specimens, items like bowls and jars fabricated from decorative stone, polished spheres and eggs, fossils, and meteorites. It’s one of those major events in the world that most of us never knew existed.

I’m not sure that composition is important for this type of image, but a try to put a striking element near the one of the intersections that divide the image into thirds horizontally and vertically. In the example above, the chosen element is the green cross-shaped pendant. In the next example, a bin of bracelets made from stones, it is the pick bracelet near the upper right one-third point.

A larger version is here.

As with panoramic photos that have a lot of detail, photos of product bins are best viewed in enlarged versions. The larger versions provide a better change of figuring out what is really going on.

A better chance, perhaps, but not a certainty. Here is a photo of a basket of polished stones, probably jasper.

The enlarged version is here. Unless you are used to looking a polished stones, I think the picture would remain puzzling. It’s okay, however, because I’ve just explained it.

I cropped the photos a little to move the highlight object to a better location. The other touch up was to lighten the shadows by 10% in Photoshop™ using the Enhance > Highlights and shadows feature. The slight lightening is a compromise between showing more detail and losing the depth effect.

I’ve taken bin of goods photos at a festival in Chinatown, at department stores in Japan, and some really shlocky souvenir stands at tourist destinations. Even tacky souvenirs deserve a documented place in history.