A little hanky panky...on amazon!

I blogged a while ago about my packaging design for Hanky Panky (lingerie company) being featured on Swedish Elle's website. Out of curiosity, I looked up "hanky panky" on amazon.com to see if the item (a trio of thongs inside a vintage-style hat box) was for sale there. And I found it! :-) For some reason, only the purple hat box is available. There is also a lime green version somewhere out there. I have yet to see the product in a real-life store yet, but they should be out in time for holiday shopping.
Buy it through this link if you're interested, it's hooked in to our Amazon Associates ID (Amazon pays us. Yay!).
Hanky Panky Thong Trio with Vintage Hat Box Panty

The above photo doesn't show that the packaging has silver hot stamping (foil) on it.
Not much of a thong girl myself, I had never heard of Hanky Panky before our first meeting. Normally, the company I work for makes mostly handmade greeting cards, coordinating gift bags and other paper items such as magnet list pads, journals, tissue paper (the gift-wrapping kind, not the rump-wiping kind). But a friend of my bosses (I work for a small family-owned company) was hired by Hanky Panky, and he recommended us for packaging their upcoming seasonal items.

At our first meeting, Hanky Panky brought in some reference photos of bombshells like Rita Hayworth, Veronica Lake and some classic Varga girl pin-ups. I was secretly delighted, because for a long time, all I drew was pin-ups. I've always had a love of vintage stuff: vintage cars, vintage design, vintage clothes, so I had a good idea of what they were looking for style-wise: a mix between art deco and classic Hollywood. Hanky Panky was quite insistent about using the colors purple and green, purple for their original style thong, and green for the low-rise version.

AARGH. Stupid [fake] Leica!

Okay. So I thought I was all super clever when I purchased my first digital camera. 

I had used pro digital SLRs, but they were always owned by the company I was working for. Borrowing the camera for personal projects was never a problem, so I had no need to buy one myself. Now that I'm not working as a commercial photographer, last year I thought it about time to get myself a little something something. SLRs are great, but bulky, so I decided on a point-and-shoot which I could take with me on outings and trips and the like. But of course, I couldn't get just any P&S, I had to get a super-fancy one.

Here's the clever part. Leica create—in my opinion and many others—the greatest cameras. Period. I've wanted one for, ever. So when I was looking into Leica P&S cameras, I learned that Panasonic makes their digital cameras, using Leica components. So looking at the Leica D-LUX 3, you find the Lumix DMC-LX2. 

The Lumix DMC-LX2 to the left (the pic is silver, but my camera is black), the Leica D-LUX 3 to the right. They're the same camera. Except the Lumix is about $300 cheaper. And has a little grippy thing. Otherwise it has the exact same components. Same high-end Leica lens, same CCD, same image processing. Did I mention they're the same? And the Lumix is way cheaper? Not even like, similar. MADE BY THE SAME COMPANY(s).

So yeah. Love my LX2. Takes awesome photos. 

That's enough of that. For a P&S, it's amazing. Awesome lens. Optical image stabilization (meaning the lens floats a bit and corrects for camera shake to an extent). Manual focus. RAW files. Widescreen CCD (not just a cropped square CCD). 10MP. The list goes on and on.

Now, for the not so happy things. It doesn't do well in low light (the next model up, released after I bought mine, is supposed to fix this and everything else I have quips with). It tends to add noise and look "processed." So effectively I only use it at ISO100. This is mostly due to 10MP CCD on a P&S. More pixels is not necessarily better. In fact, smushing more pixels into a small CCD means less quality per pixel, overall. So, zooming in to 100% of an image can often reveal limitations. At typical viewing and printing size, none of this is an issue, because the image is resized down and you don't see the imperfections. BUT: when shooting product shots, like I do for Sunshine Cupcake, I get issues.

P&S macro is hit and miss. They tend to have a longer minimum focal distance. Meaning, the camera and lens need to be further away from the subject before it can focus clearly than an SLR with a larger lens needs to be. So getting up close and personal with little clay dudes or buttons 1" tall means I have to set up my tripod (no problem), zoom in to the maximum optical zoom of 4x, and then still be over a foot away from the product. So I end up getting a little bitty button in the middle of a huge frame. Case in point:

Which when cropped, becomes this:

This does not a happy Nathan make. It's okay, and shows the product, and is better than nothing. But I will enjoy the day when we sell enough to warrant the purchase of a good ol' SLR, and keep my LX2 on my hip, where it belongs.