I'm glad that you asked me about swizzles a few weeks ago, because that's what really got me thinking about how on earth to get a decent picture of the glass ones!

Because of the little "spoon" on the end, they won't lay in the right position on a scanner, so it pretty much has to be a picture. Of course the same spoon means they usually won't lay in the right position on any other flat surface either.

Then, because the writing on most of them is white, they have to be on a dark background, or you can't read the writing. Of course, with a dark background, it didn't show off the color of the stick. Sigh...

So I tried putting them on display easels, set on a piece of black paper, so they'd hold the right position. That worked, but left a lot of easel that needed to be cropped from the picture. Not all of the sticks are perfectly straight (!), and I couldn't crop around that darn spoon! BUT...I felt that I was onto something, because being on the easel showed the color a little better than laying directly on a piece of paper.

Sooooo...I rigged up a "sling"!!! Took a couple of easels, with a dowel across them; slipped a couple of loops of nylon thread over the dowel; used the loops to suspend the swizzles over a piece of black paper, turned off the flash, put the camera in macro mode, and took the pictures.

Used Photoshop to crop and "Auto contrast" the pictures (Used "Quick Fix" on a few of them too). After my manipulations, you can't tell that the background for most of them was black, but the swizzles looked good!

Here's the "sling" thing ! Maybe someday I'll photoshop the bits of nylon thread out of the pictures...but probably not!