Jewelry Photo's

I had great results using Jennifer Kahn's tutorial http://jenkahnjewelry.blogspot.com/2008/11/photographing-jewelry.html
The downside is over 400 shots to crop and resize to 1000 pixels for my Flickr pages! I can really get hung up on the little things - instead of just taking the photo so I *DON'T* have to crop it! LOL

I do have a suggestion or two to add to this tutorial.

Wear something white or light grey! The natural light will reflect from your shirt and give your jewelry a - in my case a Burgundy [long sleeved T] cast! I had to retake a bunch of photo's then.


I use an Olympic SP-320, and simply set it to macro. Perhaps I'll try setting it manually another day that is less bright. Plenty of light for the photo's this time.
Regarding Light Sensitivity known as ISO - a setting of 100 is normal. The higher the ISO setting, the less light you need. Caution: Higher ISO will increase noise in pictures similar to graininess.

I love this photo of the ring made with fused round rod... so moody. It reminds me of depression era, the barren fields, the stark existence.
Lol, perhaps I should post a photo that does my camera justice. :-)



Lacking a wonderful African wood box I used my faux leather bound Organizer which has a very nice grain and is deep brown black. It worked very well.

I used some Tac - a plasticine type stuff made for the Office to elevate some of the pieces for a better angle. I also used another ring as a prop.

So to summarize:

- Wear Light colour clothing, neutral colours
- Natural Light - South Window, either early morning or late day.
- Simple Background, same one to tie photos together
- Camera set to Macro, No Flash
- Use the highest resolution [pixels]you can for the best quality and detail
- Use props to catch the play of light on the angles
- Large apertures (small f-stop) blur the foreground and background, creating narrow focus range. Distracting backgrounds are minimized.
- take several shots of each item so you can wade thru 400 of the :-P
- The most fabulous photo editing program for free! www.irfanview.com I've been using Irfanview for 9 years or more; it is a very small program that won't overload your system and has an astonishing number of utilities and plugins. It loads fast and has the job done before I can load Photoshop! Seriously :-) You can even carry it on a USB flash/thumb drive. I do have Photoshop for really serious photo editing, its a resourse hog and most of the time I don't need to load it with Irfanview on board! Oh, did I mention Irfanview plays mp3's, movie files, and does just about anything else you have on your PC including RAW files? Ha!



The stone in this setting leaves much to be desired as its received a knock or two so one day we'll change it! I love it though :-)

Here's to better photo's!