How I Improved My Jewelry Photos

After creating and selling jewelry for over 4 years, I have come to the conclusion that photography is one of my greatest challenges when selling online.  Getting great close-ups, images without shadows, showcasing the jewelry without too much else in the image to create a distraction yet still make the photo eye catching and on and on - we all know a great jewelry photo when we see it.  I have overcome many of these common obstacles through continued practice and experimentation with new lighting, backgrounds and camera angles yet the one issue I was never able to get a handle on was reflections on the metal.  Flat pieces came out great but dimensional pieces that were photographed at an angle (rings, bracelets, anything with a curve) still gave me problems. Most of these reflections came from the camera itself, the tripod and/or me.

I thought I had everything I needed to take great photos.  I use a Canon 50D digital SLR camera with a Canon Macro Lens, use the AV setting and set the aperture to 22 - 29 depending on how much background blur I want, set the white balance on auto, I use a lightbox, I use a tripod and the camera timer; however, none of these will help with the reflections I was getting in the metals.

Well, the light bulb finally turned on and I came to conclusion that the only way to get rid of the reflections was to somehow remove the offending item(s) that were creating them.  How would that work?  I could not remove the camera or the tripod.  I do use a timer so I could easily move to the side and remove myself, but I still had to deal with the camera and tripod.  

Then it hit me - how or why I do not know, but it did.  I had a piece of leftover white foam board (one of many from numerous school projects) sitting off to the side of my photo set up.  The piece was just slightly larger than the opening to my lightbox.  Hmmm, if positioned over the opening of the lightbox, the foam board might hide the physical elements that were creating the reflections.

I proceeded to carve out a square (probably should have done a circle) from the foam board for the camera lens and played around with this new setup for a single photo session and could not believe the difference it made.  This setup did not remove every single reflection (the hole still had to be big enough for the camera lens and for shots from a bit of a distance) but the difference was amazing and I was thrilled with the results.  I made the cutout such that I could flip the foam board several different ways depending on what angle I was trying to shoot from.

Check out my before and after pictures above.

I am sure that this is probably common sense for the many photographers out there, but for someone like me - this is HUGE!

Check out my simple photography setup without the board, with it and with the tripod.

~ Faith