Famous Jewelry Collections: THE BEADING GEM'S JOURNAL

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

THE BEADING GEM'S JOURNAL

Posted: 13 Feb 2013 05:00 AM PST

Do you make rings to sell? Then you'll know that these tiny jewelry pieces are tough to photograph to really do them credit. So here is a marvelous tip from Lex McColl, a professional product photographer and designer and the inventor of the Modahaus photo studios.

Rings are usually mounted on a small piece of putty so that they are angled correctly for the camera. However, the putty and its shadow are often visible so a fair amount of post-photography clean up with Photoshop or other editing software is required. His tip thus greatly minimizes the extra work.

What Lex suggests is to use clear stretchy elastic and to take advantage of the holes on both ends of a Modahaus table top photo studio. Punch holes if you have the older models.

Cut about 30 inches of elastic for the TS216 - more for the larger models, the TS 320 and the TS400. Tie a cocktail stick to each end. Now thread the elastic starting from the bottom left hole, through the top left hole towards the back, take it round the back and thread it towards the front through the right top hole. Finish anchoring by taking the end through the right bottom hole.

Here is the front view. Slide the ring up or down to position it with the infinity curve in the back. The elastic should have a good grip on the ring. The black background at the bottom is used to reflect back at the ring so its silver (and hard to capture) edges are sharper.

The smart case is used to diffuse light. You can change the camera and the ring positions for a pleasing composition. Remember to set your camera settings for good white background photography (see links below).

Some really minor clean up using the cloning tool in Photoshop is required to remove traces of the elastic. This is an easy chore and will take a very short time.

The same floating photography system can be applied for bangles and cuffs!

Note from Lex : The lighting used in these shots was purely to demonstrate the technique clearly and is therefore not how we'd light to bring out the best in the ring. Camera used was Samsung Galaxy EK-GC100.

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