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Shooting jewelery on white field – P365 Nov16

Purple and green african helixbeaded necklace with fluorite (need to check stone ID) pendant, by Noelle Walker.

It’s time again for Naomi to create the Bead Society of Victoria‘s quarterly magazine, and I’m giving her a hand by shooting a number of works by society members for her to use. In the past we’ve had problems with effective lighting, and shadow management on the photos, since they will be used against a white page in the magazine. However, as I learn more about photography, and get more practice with lighting, I think that I’m beginning to work it out.

Below is the setup shot for the above photo. There’s a different piece of jewelery in this shot, but the setup is the same.

I found that this setup worked for a few reasons:

  • The main light source was large, so the shadows are softer.
  • The light was almost directly overhead, keeping the shadow mostly hidden by the object.
  • The very large fill card helped fill and soften the shadows even more, both on the object and underneath it.
  • In this case, shooting almost straight down on the object helpedhid the shadow more, and keep the depth of field constant across the whole object.

4 comments

  • sanjay

    Neil

    I subscribe to your blog and it’s a pleasure reading each of your posts.

    Being a newbie, there’s always something new to learn from your posts.

    Was wondering if you could share with us information regarding the equipment that you use. Also, any particular reason that you do not publish exif data in your blogs

    Sanjay

    November 20, 2007
    Reply

  • Neil Creek

    Hi Sanjay!

    Thank you for your kind words :) It’s nice to know someone is getting value from my posts :) I still feel like a noob myself, but I hope to be learning more about photography for the rest of my life. In the meantime, I love to share what I know!

    Your suggestion about putting the exif data on the blog is an excellent one, and one which has briefly crossed my mind a number of times before, but I’ve never done anything about it.

    I had a wuick look at the files I’m uploading, and it seems that photoshop strips the metadata when I “save for web”. I’ll have to fix that. As for getting it displayed once it’s on the blog… Well I use a great wordpress plugin called “flickr tag” by Jeff Maki which lets me pull the photos from my flickr gallery. If I can find out a way to get it to automatically display the EXIF from those files, I’ll definately do it, but the idea of putting the EXIF in manually is a bit daunting.

    Thanks for the suggestion and giving me the motivation to follow it up! Stay tuned :)

    November 20, 2007
    Reply

  • Neil Creek

    I just realised I ignored your question about my equipment. Probably the easiest way to answer that is to point you to the “equipment” category which you can click on in the categor cloud at the top right :)

    November 20, 2007
    Reply

  • Sanjay

    Neil

    thanks for responding to my comments. I found the equipment cloud, although it took me a minut or two figure out where it is.

    Also, i dont see an About page on your website. I couldnt find it in Tag Clouds as well.

    Is it running on wordpress. I somehow, dont like the template.

    Sorry to pick on you once again. :)

    Sanjay

    Sorry,

    November 22, 2007
    Reply

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