Fishing for TreasureAdventures in Junk

I was want­ing to pho­to­graph some vin­tage ear­rings for sale. Jew­elry is a real chal­lenge for the ama­teur prod­uct pho­tog­ra­pher because it’s small, it’s shiny, and you want the pic­tures to be very focused and detailed. And beyond that, you want them to be gor­geous, and three-​​dimensional, and to look so real that the viewer will fall in love with the ear­rings at once and cash in her kids’ col­lege funds to pos­sess them.

And you don’t want peo­ple to see the teeny tiny lit­tle images of your elbows and cam­era reflected in the surface.

So I looked around for a stu­dio. The sewing machine cab­i­net is cov­ered up right now, so I decided on the old oak wash stand in the liv­ing room. I hung a white sheet from the towel rack, care­fully smooth­ing and curv­ing it to give that “end­less hori­zon” invis­i­ble look to the back­ground. Then I tossed down some ear­rings and took a prac­tice shot, with the cam­era set to the largest image.

You can see the (resized) result up top. It’s a pass­able pic­ture. The back­ground is invis­i­ble, and the prod­ucts are in focus and not washed out. But I wanted more! I wanted it to be dra­matic and sexy and compelling!

So I whipped out the crin­kled black vel­veteen! Ah, yes, much more like a jew­elry store photo, but a bit dark. (It was late, and I was using the flash point­ing straight up.) I grabbed my stu­dio lights — a pair of those clamp-​​on work lights with metal reflec­tors — and attached one on each side of the studio.

Yow! Way too much light! This would be fine for, say, a wooden object on a white sheet. Wood soaks up a lot of light. But the shiny jew­elry and vel­veteen wash right out. And there wasn’t room to move the lights far­ther out.

I decided to go back to the flash point­ing straight up, and use Picasa to brighten the pic­tures. Picasa is one of the great secrets of mod­ern pho­tog­ra­phy. (The other secret is to take a boat­load of pics and delete all the fuzzy ones!)

For the indi­vid­ual pics, I used my close-​​up lens. This is a dandy doo-​​dad that really improves the focus. I also exper­i­mented with the back­grounds. Even when it’s almost dark, the color of the vel­veteen affects the color of the prod­uct. I ended up using the crin­kled black for the white beads, red for the gold and sil­ver, and green for the red ear­rings. And as before, I kept the cam­era set to its largest image.

On the left is the first image. It’s pretty good. I used Picasa to crop it a bit, and then used the High­light slider under Tun­ing to add a bit of bright­ness. You have to be care­ful with that, it’s easy to dis­tort the col­ors and wash out the pic­ture. Finally, I used the Sharpen com­mand under Effects. I love Sharpen — it makes the pic just the teen­si­est bit clearer.

The color in the first pic­ture is actu­ally truer to the ear­rings. This is often a prob­lem — when you get some­thing bright enough to make a good pic­ture, it doesn’t look the same as under nat­ural light. And likely it will be fur­ther dis­torted by the viewer’s mon­i­tor and color set­tings. So I made sure to give my own impres­sion of the color in the prod­uct description.

After every­thing was fin­ished, I used Picasa’s Export to resize and save, set­ting the pics at 800 pix­els for the web­site list­ings and 300 pix­els for this blog.

Here’s another exam­ple, of the red ear­rings first on the white sheet and then on the green vel­veteen. I took the sec­ond pic­ture a lit­tle to the right rather than straight on, hop­ing to make it look more three-​​dimensional.

You’re right, what you’re see­ing in the shiny part is teeny lit­tle reflec­tions of my cam­era. That’s because I didn’t have a helper stand­ing to one side with a dark sheet, angling it until it reflects in the surface.

Well, that’s enough wis­dom for one les­son! I’m going to make like a tired lit­tle teddy bear and fall into an artis­tic heap some­where. And remem­ber, the kids can always work their way through col­lege, but you really need cos­tume jewelry!