For the past several months, Marco Tomaschett, the coordinator of the new Fine and Vintage Writing Instruments Department at Swann Auction Galleries, and I have been assembling and cataloging our inaugural sale of fine and vintage writing instruments. With that complete, now comes the fun part, creating the visuals and assembling the sale as presented in the online and paper catalogues. We thought that you might like to see at least part of that process as we photographed the pens in our New York galleries during the third week of July. The photography was done by Brilliant Graphics, the photographer Peter Philbin, assisted by Pete and Christa, whose surnames I did not get. Thos involved from Swann were me, department coordinator Marco Tomaschett and art director Bette Rothstein. For me, since I photograph pens for my own website, it was fascinating to see how the pros work, using lighting and shadow so carefully and the extent to which post production process...
