Toronto Photography Meetup Group

I tried photographing the engagement ring I used to propose and my recommendation is this:

Keep everything dust free!!!!

I would also try to keep the macro to a minimum in your case...of course it depends on what you are shooting.

Not sure how you guys are managing this with hot lights. Not the best suggestions for quality work...sorry. Clients don't want to see grain in the shots. All images also needs to be processed.
Jewelery needs to be all in focus and I remember years ago I was doing it at F11 or so for little pieces. Had to use 4 strobes.
At all manual, you can make your processing faster in LR by editing one image and applying the same preset to the others.
500 pieces properly done is 2 days of work (with an assistant). Plus 1-2 days on all the editing. You can use Plastic/plexiglass piece of sheet for the items. Materials don't work too well. Nobody wants to see wrinkles. Silk can look pretty cool too...

Thanks DmitriM, I've posted my test shots of the two pieces in a new posting here. I used a softbox and shot at f11 and f16 tethered with a remote, mirror lockup as well.

http://tpmg.ca/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18929

Wow, 2 days to shoot 500 pieces with 2-3 images for each piece? Let's do the math

if you group the pieces together in categories, there should be fewer lighting changes. You should be able to use the same set up for groups of similar jewelry for sure.

Also agree, hopefully you can batch process a lot of them and then spend the time just fine tuning, rather than starting from scratch a lot of the time.

Are you expected to name each image? Wouldn't that be easier for the client to do since they recognize each piece by looking at it?

I had shot eyeglasses with this method and ran into an issue with darker / lighter coloured frames that required a lot of tweaking to the lighting setup to expose properly. This made batch processing almost impossible

Also agree with finding a surface as smooth as possible (and if you want no background, as white as possible) post processing that afterwards is A HUGE pain.

[quote="LeesaM"]

Wow, 2 days to shoot 500 pieces with 2-3 images for each piece? Let's do the math

Separate them into batches: colored,1 color,dark,light. Then you can still do smaller batches.

I never photographed glasses,but I did some retouching for Gucci sun glasses once. After I was done, there was little left from the original photos(including reflections) lol. Not many companies can afford to pay $80/h for photo retouching that can take 4-5 hours per single photo!

I've been busy these last 2 days fiddling and fussing. I decided to reshoot everything I did from the first day as I wasn't happy with what I did.

If you want to see some of the final photos you can visit here:

http://flickr.com/gp/leesamclellan/P9871m/

My two main problems were with White Balance and DOF.

I used my preset with a grey card but still ended up with pinky or yellowy tones. All my light bulbs are the same, however, I am not in a controlled lighting room. I use Camera Control Pro 2 tethered and still tweaked the WB settings.

Then DOF was an issue with getting the front and back of the bracelets in focus.

I manually focussed on 1/2 way or maybe 1/3 way trying to keep the front of the bracelet in focus.

Not totally thrilled with the overall sharpness. I think if I was doing a portfolio I would take between 3-5 shots and merge them all in post to get the entire bracelet in crisp, sharp focus. But I'm not getting paid that much for this job so tried a work around.

Also thought maybe a tilt/shift lens would be the solution?

Anyway, you can check out what I've done and I will be adding to this as I go along.

Thanks
Leesa

What lens are you shooting with? DON'T use macro, instead use a mild wide to mild tele range; I'm using an 18-55 on a 1.6 crop which gives me a range of 28-88mm. Since you are shooting for web, you have lots of room for cropping.

Nice job Leesa!

Really? No macro lens?

Dammit, I wish I knew that before buying a new one!!!!



However, I'll give it a try and compare the results. Thanks mikefellh.

Thanks! I appreciate that comment.

This is a hell of a lot of work!!!

Well...so far I'm liking the pics. I'm just kind of wondering why your client would prefer to make the objects look like they're floating instead of having something that will create more depth to it.

the sho9ts are well composed and exposed.

My only comment is maybe they look a little flat. I dont see a lot of sparkle coming from your light set up. The front looks more flat especially, maybe a small accent or catch light from the front would add some sparkle?

He's referring to another jewelry website which are all floating. I guess he likes that look. Nothing but the jewelry piece.

Actually, when I did the test shot for the client of the ring and cuff links, I added specular highlights but he didn't want that.

I did use silver paper to add some to the Breast Cancer pieces which had rhinestones.