Tuesday Series - Product Photo Tips

I begin this discussion, the 3rd in the series of photo tips, showing some of the choices we have made in backgrounds for my jewelry. Our first choice was to just shoot on a white, slightly reflective base of transluscent white acrylic. The success of this shot is its focus (all shot on a flat plane from directly above), it's well lit, and the color is true to the bracelet/necklace combination. The problem? It has, in my opinion, no personality; it has nothing to draw you to it. A giant HO-HUM ...

Okay. Let's try the other extreme. A reflective black acrylic sheet that will bounce the details of the jewelry back to the viewer. Of course this means adjusting the exposure on the camera to keep the contrast from being too great, but by shooting a range of exposures, you assure you will have at least one good shot. No problem with digital technology! Just discard the shots that aren't winners, and keep the promising ones. The success here: good focus and light, just like before. And there is a lovely reflection of the scalloped edge of the bracelet in the black just below the stones. And it is kind of striking, specially with brightly colored items. The problem? These stones are subtle in color softly moving from bluish gray to pale yellow green. The color of the stones completely washes out and no amount of Photoshop heroics will revive it. The black background really transmits through the lightly transluscent chalcedony stones. Blah. And a gallery full of black photos makes your shop site look ... fill in the adjective ... but in my opinion, too dark. I know, because mine was just that for several months, and I was never happy with it. And, if you are on Etsy you'll NEVER get in a treasury.

Next experiment: Velvet, non-reflective backdrop in what is really a warm french vanilla color. In person it looked really lovely and the shiny stones stood off from the flat background beautifully. The success? The stones, all of them, are really true to their actual color. The hanging format of the piece is different, and pleasant. The problem is the background color did not photograph true. It shot very much darker and blended in with the stones so much that the photo is, once again, unremarkable. Reshooting with pale blue and a dark gold velvet produced even worse results.

So far we have produced some adequate, closeup, well-focused photos that many might be happy with (and frankly, would be an improvement over many shop photos on the web), but I'm thinking there is more we can do. There needs to be more color, more pop, yet still focus on the product itself without distraction. With this in mind we began experimenting with colored acrylic sheets in red, green, blue, yellow and orange. These colors alone were entirely too shocking, and overcame the delicate nature of all the jewelry placed on it.

But by layering the colored sheets on each other (in the case of this next example blue on black), we could make more subtle and more interesting colors. But we didn't stop there. We played with the top light shining down into the tent, not through the open hole (which can create a perfect reflection of the light bulb and reflector), but actually through the fabric which diffuses it into a fuzzy light spot on the shiny acrylic. By carefully aiming the camera down onto the plane of acrylic and moving the top light around until the actual reflection of this light spot above shows in the acrylic where you want it, you achieve this:

I think this is really nearly perfect. But it is still very black, and again, too much black just isn't snappy. Further experiments in layering the colored acrylics, particularly the complements (directly across the color wheel) i.e. orange and green, produced a bronzy tone, and yellow and blue made a brownish color that we found added some color to the shop gallery and yet enhanced the character of the bracelet itself.

I really like this. My DH photographer sees that double reflection beneath the bracelet, one each from the two layers of acrylic, and finds fault. So, we keep searching for additional ways to display the jewelry in a striking and descriptive way. But if we never get beyond this, I'm happy.


I have mentioned that we use Photoshop, one of several photo corrective software programs available. My DH is a graphic artist and we have access to the Professional version of Photoshop, but my expertise is strictly self-taught and only as deep as needed to crop, sharpen and brighten the photos we take. We don't add anything that isn't there in the camera shot.

This is the end of this series of Photo Tips. If you have learned anything from it, I'm glad, and I invite you to comment and leave your shop address in the comment. I'd love to see what YOU are doing with your photos!


To comment click once on the tiny number right of this post's dateline
I invite you to note your blog URL in your comment


jbEbert jewelry on Etsy