Help with taking pictures of sparkling jewellery?
I need to take pictures of some jewellery items for a website. I am not very experienced with taking pictures and these jewellery pictures are just not working for me.
I am using a light tent and lighting it with a table lamp with 60w craft light (day light bulb) they not that common here in UK.
I’m using this camera
http://www.cameras.co.uk/reviews/canon-ixus-70.cfm
I have set it to macro setting.
but the pictures come out blury or just not crisp enough.
Is the camera not good enough for the job?
and how should position the light? from the opening at the front of the tent? from top of the tent or right or left? or do I need more then 1 light?
Any advice will be helpful.
Metal only and diamond commercial jewellery is relatively easy to shoot, but you do need proper equipment, which is a light stand (never use light boxes for jewellery photography) and any decent SLR camera with at least 105mm macro lenses will do the trick. Although for the bracelets and necklaces you will need a lenses with tilt & shift (very hard to find though). Coloured gemstones jewellery and designer pieces are however a completely different story and I doubt you will be able to get good results fast. You should be willing to invest a great deal of money in each shot + editing or do 3D reverse which ranges about 50-100GBP per item. You may consider an Imagedome (which is about 3000 GBP), at least Nikon D200 and a range of micro and tilt & shift lenses, plus a lot of experimenting and testing. If you are interested in high-end pictures, you can order 3D reverse from your photos. I don’t know any company, who does that in UK, but you can chat with the folks from Fameo < http://www.fameo.co.uk >, since they use this technique at least for the posters and sone complicated items.
No good equipment:
* Camera (Canon IXUS) you are using now is not good.
* Light tent and 60w lamp is not good.
Good equipment:
* Nickon D200 ( or any Nickon SLR for that matter) body
* AF-S Micro-Nikkor 60mm ( macro lense good for most of thre jewellery)
* Nikon PC-Micro Nikkor 85mm f/2.8 D Special Perspective ( tilt & shift lense to use for the braceletes and necklaces)
* ImageDome Digital Imaging System by Gemvision ( this been discounted so the only chance you have is to get it on Ebay)
* Cubelite Light Table Kit ( good for large jewellery items, but must be boosted by additional Tungsten lights)
Pop Up Tent Review Goes Bad….
