Photographing Jewelry - The Basics

As a jewelry designer or as a newbie to the field, you will agree that its worth having a form of archive or a portfolio of your past works. This is necessary to share your photos with prospective clients, it also allows you to refer to them when looking for ideas and serves as a reminder of what you have accomplished.
In this post, I will be sharing the basic tips needed to help with the process at a beginners level.
You do not need a lot at this level, although it can be sometimes tempting to get the best materials you need to showcase the best you have put in your jewelry, this can be sometimes costly, so its advisable to stay within the limit and minimise cost as much as you can.

What you need...
The Jewelry, a digital camera, 2 sheets of white cardboards, and a window with good white light coverage.

Camera:
1. Set your camera to manual mode.
2. Programme the white balance setting - This will help the camera adjust itself to various lighting conditions.
3. Turn off the flash - This will remove glaring from the metals or crystals you might have in your jewelry.
4. Ensure you have enough battery life to cover the session.

Lighting:
In general, lighting is essential when taking photos, there are different ways to adopt a good lighting system. I will be focusing more on a DIY approach, as you get comfortable with this, it will help learn the tricks of taking beautiful photos and help work your way up to an intermediate and advanced stage.
I find that photos are best taken around 11am to 2pm, although this can be affected depending on the condition of the weather.

1.Set your table close enough to the window. (I.e) the Jewelry facing the window.
2.Use a sheet of the cardboard to act as a backdrop for the jewelry you are photographing, if required use a tape to hold it in place.
3.Use the second cardboard sheet as a base. Ie. Where the jewelry will sit on. This can be cut to a comfortable size providing there is nothing else coming into the picture. Some people prefer to use a jewelry display with their jewelry and others prefer the jewelry without the display. You should try the two options to see what works best for your kind of jewelry. Make sure you take the pictures from different angles.

Cleaning: Clean your jewelry before taking pictures.

Patience: Patience and practice are very important. Take a break and see how the images are coming up and make changes if need be, you will be surprised of your newly found skill :-)

Please feel free to leave me a comment to know how you got on and throw any questions you might have along the way.