I have just started trying to teach myself how to take photos of gemstones - I will be working with Loose stones mostly but the ring is the only thing that I have to practice on at the moment. It has proved quite tricky. This is my first attempt. This is the one that I am most happy with to date. Please give me your comments
I have considered that approach, Maybe a clear perspex layer with a small hole to hold the lose stone might work. Have to work out where I can get one from
Thanks both of you for your comments. I am looking forward to getting some lose gem stones to play with. Havent got any yet so I was trying with the ring.
Not sure how I can get more DOF. I am already at the smallest apeture I can go with the camera. I am using an add on Macro element to capture the maximum detail but maybe I should think about losing some absolute detail and use the camera without the Macro element and just crop. Might give me better results. I will try it.
I have used the white paper as I am expecting thatthe stones that I will ultimately be protograhing will be Sapphire and Ruby, not diamond but I will give a Black Background a try.
Brad, for a first time, this is great. One thing you may want to look at is other sites shots. Do they have crystal clear rings / gemstones? Or do they have the falloff in focus as we see here? In either case, you can achieve the same results. If you have a manual setting on your camera you will want to use a larger aperture number to achieve more of the item in focus and a smaller aperture number to achieve less Depth of Field.
Well, I can't give you comments with any knowledge of how to do this sort of thing, because if this is the only one you ever did, it would be one more than me. Ok, so a comment just as a dispassionate observer: I imagine brightness and clarity are the things a client would want, yes? The gold of the ring and the stone on top have that. I might perhaps want just a tad more dof, esp on top, but that's a matter of taste. What I really query is the vignetting in the corners, and the posterisation I see in some areas (faint but perceptible). Posterisation, of course, is only for computers - if this is for print media use it won't be a problem. The vignetting, maybe a black b/g instead of white (the traditional black velvet)? Just some thoughts - as I said, I've never done this and have no practical expertise.
(Tks for yr comment on my photo of the mock-pirate boy. It's not underexposed-muddy, it's hand-tinted muddy - I was experimenting with reproducing 1950s hand-tinting using photoshop. The original image is pretty well exposed. But thanks for the comment abt bringing him away from the wall to avoid shadows - yes indeed. My problem is, if I do that, there's no context - the shadow at least stops him appearing to be floating in space. But genuine thanks, your comments were/are useful).
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{K:4294} 6/27/2003