My top-professional photo studio

I have been frustrated for long.

I create great jewelry, but the pictures I make of it just doesn't do it justice! My x husband, who is a very gifted amateur photographer used to take the pictures and they were great. Look at this one!

But even though he's the best, I still don't want to beg him to take pictures every other day. So, I needed to come up with a solution that I could handle myself.

I have followed the advice of taking pictures in daylight, but honestly: winter in Denmark is VERY dark, even at noon. The result was dull pictures :-( By accident (while browsing on Flicr) I stumbeled on an instruction in taking great pictures of jewelry and from there how to create the right setup. Next thing I knew, I was buying the following:

1 cardboard-box (foldable)
1 roll of gaffa tape
1 white pillow-case
1 500 W halogen work lamp
1 sheet of white cardboard

Sounds utterly professional, right?

Well, I cut out the sides of the cardboard box, covered them with the white fabric from the pillow case (using the gaffa tape), put in the white cardboard and set up the lamp outside of it. Adding an additional and smaller halogen lamp in front of the open box, I all of a sudden had created an environment with light enough to take a lot better pictures! Here is what it looks like:

And a close-up on the "stage":

So what's the big difference?

Lots of light which creates this dreamy and sumptuous ambience. Take a look at these two before and after pictures and you'll know what I'm talking about.

Before:

After:

Obviously it also helps to try o push your camera to perform its best (still haven't tweaked everything possible with mine I think) but I'm afraid that I'll have to invest in a better camera some day. Thing is, I have a pocket camera. A very decent one from Canon, granted, but still - it just can't handle a few things and it's impossible to entirely circumvent the auto functions. Especially focusing on shiny objects is seemingly tough -fairly annoying when the item to be photographed is shiny jewelry.

But no matter what: I love my new setup and truly believe that my pictures have increased in quality - and hence also convey the quality of the jewelry. Now it's "just" taking all those pictures, cutting them in Photoshop and re-uploading them instead of the old ones. That will take some time. Oh well... :-D