I have spent most of today playing with my new camera. It took quite some time for me to dig out the vague memories of my bits of study in photography and to get the hang of this particular camera. Eventually I hit upon some settings that seemed to be doing an okay job and proceeded to spend hours (and hours!) leaning in awkward positions over my tripod to take almost 300 photographs of my work.
I am now laying on the couch in lots of pain as a result – suffering for the sake of art, as usual!
Of course there aren’t 300 usable shots – a large chunk have been trashed and the remainder edited for use. And some I’ll use for now but know they still need to be done again when I can mange it. Here is an image of my blossom chain as taken today.
A lot of people really struggle to photograph their own craft/art well – and jewellery and metal is particularly difficult because of the reflections you get. However, I think I’m slowly getting there.
The best piece of advice I can give anyone wishing to photograph jewellery or other small objects is to set up a light tent of some description in a well lit place. I have invested in a fold-up cube made of opaque white fabric – it has a panel with a slit in it for the camera lens to poke through. This works very well to diffuse the light outside the cube and removes a lot of the unwanted reflections.
From there it’s a matter of playing to get the right lighting – whether you sit whatever sort of light tent you’ve got (even a cone of thick tracing paper does a fairly good job) outside in the full sunlight or if you’ve got some basic photography lighting, as I do (very very basic!). Getting the light right makes a world of difference – and experimenting is very important.
However, so does the camera. Here are a couple of test photos I took with my existing snapshot camera and my brand new SLR. Both have been edited in exactly the same way with the same compression to be put online and both were taken in exactly the same conditions … and the difference in detail is pretty amazing, really (you’ll probably need to click on the images to really see the difference).
So the moral of the story is: light tent, lots of good light outside the light tent and – if you can afford it (or, like me, can suspend disbelief for long enough) – a digital SLR camera. Oh – and lots and lots of practice. I need to be taking note of this myself, of course!
