Experiment: shooting a faceted gemstone – P365 Oct05
- At November 12, 2007
- By Neil Creek
- In Experimental, Jewelery, Macro
2
My father set before me a great challenge: photographing one of his faceted gemstones. In fact, dad would like to get photos of many other of his stones. So I want to find the way to get the best possible photos of such gems, consistently.
Faceted gemstones are cut in a very specific way to try and reflect light directly out the top of the stone, similar to the glass beads in street signs. This gives the stone its brilliance. The problem with this is that off-axis light isn’t reflected back into the camera, and as a result the facets will appear very dark, even if the stone is light and translucent. I suspect the ideal light might be a kind of ring light, but I don’t have one. Here are some of my attempts:
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Initially I tried against a black background to emphasise the stone’s brilliance. Unfortunately it looked to me that this stone’s subtle pale pink colour was completely lost, so I tried a white background instead.
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This shot has the stone on a white plate in a light tent with the flash to the side. Dull, dull dull! This won’t do.
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To mimic the effect of a ring light I tried darkening the room, doing a three second exposure, and setting my 580EX flash to multi flash mode at 15Hz at 1/64th. During the exposure I tried to hold the flash head as close to (behind) the lens as possible without casting a shadow on the stone. I swept the flash around the lens from the left over the top to the right. This gave me lots of great highlights reflected, but it was too contrasty and seemed to flatten the stone cos highlights came from everywhere.
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Finally I tried combining the second and third techniques by putting the stone in the light tent, and exposing for ambient to give me a three second exposure, during which I popped the flash on 1/64th three times from different angles. The result is too dark, but I got a nice reflected highlight on the top facet.
So I’m not exactly sure what to try next. Making a DIY ring light could be a bit tricky, but Strobist is focussing on ring lights all week, so maybe I’ll learn something there I can apply to this challenging photo.
Update: I posted to the Strobist discussion forum asking for suggestions on how to get a great photo of the gem, and I’ve received lots of very useful suggestions, and great links to read. I’ll be trying the shoot again with these ideas and will post the results then, but I thought you’d like to see the discussion as well.
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Lau @ Digital Photography Tutorials
very good tutorial and good photos
Neil Creek
Thank you, I’m glad you found it useful. I can assure you, however, that I’ll be able to do better next time, and when I do, I’ll write up how I did it :)