It’s not every day you pull out your necklaces and position them for a perfect shot, but maybe you’re sending everyone pictures of your engagement ring. Perhaps you got a great deal on eBay and want to show it to your friends. Who knows—whatever the case may be, there’s an art to capturing jewels on film.

Tabletop Studio offers a few great tips, including:

“Good jewelry photography needs sharp, crisp focus. It is worth getting out your camera's manual to find out how to put the camera in "spot focus" mode. The normal focus mode of digital cameras is some sort of average focus mode. That means that the camera will look at a wide area of a scene and base the focus on that area. Since you want to control where the camera is focusing, it's better for jewelry photography to put the camera into spot focus mode, this will allow you to control more precisely what the camera will be focusing on. However, even in spot focus mode many digital cameras can't really ‘lock-in’ on a small shiny object like gemstone jewelry using auto focus. So unfortunately, for close-up jewelry photography, you need a camera with good manual focus capability.”

Read the rest of the article here.

Photo Diamond Macro 3