Photographing Jewelry in the Studio

I just finished a shot I was doing for a local jewelry company and the setup was so fun I thought I'd document it. I don't go into much detail here, but if anyone wants to ask a question about how I did such-and-such, I'm certainly open to communicating. Jewelry is particularly difficult to shoot amongst the many different types of products I photograph. The camera shows everything, so if it's going lo-rez on a website, we're fine. However, if it is for a full page advertisement or something where detailed closeups are going to be used, I always budget several hours for retouching and digital work. There is a lot more to this type of photography than meets the eye.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• Photography
• Jewelry
• Photographing
• Studio
• Camera
• How
• To
• Photograph
• Table
• Top

[deadbeatdad]

Soft boxes are great for portraiture, but they make jewelry look flat and lifeless. It takes many lights or reflectors to pickup the various facets in the jewelry. Jewelry needs at least some hard light sources in most cases....especially when the stones have multiple facets. Everyone has their own approach to this stuff and if I was doing a different piece of jewelry, I would have done it differently perhaps. In any case, the client loved it....and that's the bottom line. Thanks.

[1axvn]

Professional, what dose that imply? Is the camera your using a digital camera? Doing it right/better/faster/cost effective, these all seem loaded questions. In your option, what is the % of better photos (in digital form) for your photos cost verses a shot they could do there self.

[deadbeatdad]

I think the answer to this is pretty obvious, but without going into detail, the camera is the least important factor in this process. The lighting and knowledge of how to light a piece of jewelry is the most important thing. There are a lot of ways of doing this, depending on what you are aiming for. Anyone can do this on their own if they have the lighting, knowledge and ability to set it up, but I could not venture to explain the entire process in a ten minute video. Best of luck to you!

[deadbeatdad]

Thanks oldernwiser. The camera is about a foot away from the jewelry. It's a macro lens so I could have gone a lot closer for detail, but this client was trying to save money and to photograph each piece individually would have yielded better images, but cost a lot more. So I just shot them as a group (which they needed anyway) and then cropped out each individual color to show their assortment of colors in individual images. I had a variety of backgrounds too, so they had a lot of choices.

[ppgfinn]

How many suns are we used to?? Overkill for sure. It could be done in 10 minutes with one key light and a fill card. Why complicate things?

[adiphoto]

You went with to much lights when you could done the job with one big soft light and some difuzers.

[Foga28]

Overkill

[great6115]

omg. thats a lot of lights. wow. am still learning. hopefully i will learn how to pull of an 20+ light setup with less than 5 light. thanks for posting though

[msscreenwriter]

Very nice. Some things require more than three speed lights.;)

[oldernwiser0]

very informative.. shows what hard work really goes into a good photograph ! btw, what is the distance between the camera and the jewellery being shot ? would it be better to zoom or move the camera close to the object being shot ? thanks for letting me know .