Good Lighting for Jewelry Photo Shooting
Good lighting for jewelry photo shooting will help you come up with the best possible image, great images are important for portfolios or if you are setting up your online jewelry store, this can make or break the image of your jewelry, whether you captured it in a landscape or portrait position. Most of professional photographers have plenty of photographing equipment to use in creating perfect spot-on images. As to some artisans, with no such skills in photography, they don’t have the technical idea on how to perfectly capture the best image of their handmade jewelries. Their skill in photography is limited on piddling small details like figuring out the right lens would be suitable in capturing a wonderful picture. In addition, building a professional photography studio would cost too much for these people.
However, there are a few not-so-expensive options of building your own photographing studio. You can start looking around to those materials at home. As an established jewelry business finding a good sales rep, if you have the budget, is a great investment as they will have a lot of knowledge to share with you on how to take great photos to increase your sales.
To come up with good lighting for jewelry photo shooting, you must balance the real and fake lights. Most of the people just use digital or automatic cameras to take pictures of their jewelry items. Before taking the picture, they make sure their items look good just by adding a few background to enhance its photographic image. However, after taking some pictures and viewing it on screen, most of the images come out blurred by bright hot spots and some may even come out dull or very dark. This is very common due to imbalanced lighting on the item and the strength of the flash is too strong. This is because the camera cannot see the light around the object; the light reflected from the object should be measured and should compensate accordingly.
The most appropriate flash in good photography is called fill flash. It uses a little amount of extra light to fill out the shadows that can make catch lights, which are fine reflections of light on a shiny surface. A good example of which is a professional portraiture, it gets rid of shadows and creates a catch light.
For indoor photo shooting, you must prepare lots of light. You can use your normal light from an average lamp or ceiling light called Tungsten. These very yellow/orange lights give your pictures a very orange cast look. Similar to tungsten, fluorescent lights also produce bright lights and are usually green. With our naked eyes, we don’t simply see it because our eyes are just processing the different sorts of lights with a built-in white balance. Oftentimes, it is more appropriate to use a blue daylight bulb and some cheap lamp stands. A nice blue-white light thrown out by daylight bulbs simulates a real daylight illuminating a work area without giving a bright orange color to everything in the photograph.
In an outdoor photo shoot, you’ll need a sunny/cloudy but bright day, a white cotton bead sheet, your jewelry pieces, a friend or washing line, and your camera.
In doing some outdoor photo shoots, it would be a lot easier to have someone that would serve as a stand over to the piece that would block the sun using the white sheet. The sheet acts as a diffuser and helps distribute the light evenly all over your work and illuminates your piece without a blurred contrast. You can as well turn off your flash because the amount of light from the sun is enough to make your camera work without the automatic flash. You can use your washing line as an alternative if you don’t have your friend. Just place your sheet over your line and secure it with pegs so it doesn’t slide off, then set up your work in a bright spot beneath it.
To set up your self-made studio indoors, you will need a large white, cloudy transparent plastic storage container to reflect and diffuse the shine of the light. You can also use a light box where you can set up your jewelry pieces but it can only work well with cast-eye beads, crystals, glass and any translucent and transparent beads. The light box will give a gentle light through the crystals or glass beads and illuminate them. Use a white sheet or some of layers of tracing papers to dull the light if the glow is too strong.
Try to build this last option called a light dome. This is very affordable and so easy to make. Just prepare two liters of plastic bottle of milk and pull the label off. Cut it in half. Cut a big hole at the front area for your camera. After that, just set up your jewelry pieces, pop your camera into the hole, perfectly focus it to your pieces, and then shoot. The dome will catch the light and it will be evenly distributed.
It is important to bear in mind that natural light is always better compared to artificial light. Best results regarding jewelry photo shooting usually come from pictures that have good lighting techniques without any use of camera flashes. Using a tripod is highly recommended because it makes you take pictures in longer exposures thus, making rich and more detailed colors without the unwanted glaring effects on your pieces. Planning and designing your own jewelry photo shoot is a great way to showcase your work in a portfolio or magazine, if you take the steps listed above then you are sure to create some very professional looking photos.
