Handmade Jewelry: Good Lighting For Jewelry Photo Shooting

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Good lighting is very essential in photographing a jewelry. This can make or break the image of your jewelry, whether you captured it in a landscape or portrait position. Most of professional photographers have plenty of photographing equipment to use to create an perfect spot-on images. As to some artisans, with no such skills in photographing, and doesn't have the technical idea of how to perfectly capture their handmade jewelry. Their craft, making handmade jewelry, is to far than piddling small details like finding out what lens would be suitable in capturing a wonderful picture. Plus, considering the fact that building a professional photographing studio cost thousands of dollars for them.

However, there are few not-so-expensive options of building your own photographing studio. You can start looking around to those materials at home.

To photograph your jewelry, you must balance the ''real'' and ''fake'' light. Most of the people just use a digital or film camera to take pictures of their jewelry items. Before the picture taking, they set the their items first so they will look good, adding few backgrounds to enhance the over all look. However, after taking pictures and view it on screen, most of the time the image is blurred out by bright hotspot and the rest are of their jewelry photo is dull or very dark. This is very common cause of imbalance lightning on the item and the strength of the flash is too strong. This is because the camera cannot see the light around the object, the light reflected off the object should be measured and compensates accordingly.

The flash that should be needed is called ''fill flash''. This is just a little amount of extra light to fill out the shadows that can make a ''catch lights'', which is a fine reflection of light on a shiny surface. A good example of this is a professional portraiture, it can rids off shadows and create a catch light.

For indoor photo shooting, you must prepare lots of light. You can use your normal light from an average lamp or ceiling light called Tungsten. Just put, it's a very yellow/orange light and gives your pictures a very orange cast look. Similar to tungsten, fluorescent lights produces bright light, it is actually green. With our human eyes, we don't simply see it because our eyes are just processing the different sorts of light with a built-in white balance. It is more suggested to use a blue ''daylight'' bulb and some cheap lamp stands. A nice blue-white light thrown out by daylight bulbs simulates a real daylight illuminates a work area without giving a bright orange color to everything in the photograph.

In an outdoor photo shoot, first you'll need a sunny/cloudy but bright day, a white cotton bead sheet, your jewelry pieces, a friend or washing line, a your camera.

Go outside, it is more easier to have your friend to be a stand over to the piece whilst that blocks directly the sun using the white sheet. The sheet acts as a diffuser and help distribute the light evenly all over your work and illuminates your piece without a blurred contrast. If you could be able to turn off your flash, because the amount of light from the sun is enough to make your camera work without the automatic flash.

You can use your washing line as an alternative if you don't have your friend. Just place your sheet over your line and secure it with pegs so it doesn't slide off, then set up your work in bright spot beneath.

To set up you self-made studio indoors, you will need a large white, cloudy transparent plastic storage container to reflect and diffuse the shine of the light. You can also use a light box where you can set up you jewelry pieces but it can only works well with casteye beads, crystals, glass and any translucent and transparent beads. The light box will give a gentle light through the crystals or glass beads and illuminate them. Use a white sheet or some of layers of tracing paper to dull the light if the glow is too strong.

Try to build this last option called a ''light dome'', this is very affordable and so easy to make. Just prepare two liter of plastic bottle of milk and pull the label off. Cut it in half. Cut a hole big for the front area of your camera on one side. After that, just set up your jewelry pieces, pop your camera into the hole, perfectly focus it to your pieces, then shoot. The dome will caught the light and it will evenly distributed.

An important reminder, a natural light is always better compared to artificial light. Best results usually comes from pictures that have good light and haven't uses a camera flash. If you can use a tripod, much better. Using a tripod is highly recommended for you can take pictures in a longer exposure and thus making a rich and more detailed colors without the unwanted glaring effects to your pieces. Working with tripod also means no flash.

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