Jewlery shots in a light box with a 105mm lens with macro filter

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Wink Jones

Wink Jones

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I thought I would share a few of the photos I used to take of the jewelry I was selling. These were taken with a D7100.


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Here are a few more. My Mac has made things difficult, again, and I can no longer post my pictures on drop box. My PC, however, in my home office, is happy to do so. Last night I did not want to wake my wife going into my downstairs office, so I am glad to find I can still use my photos from dropbox.

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One thing I quickly realized when looking through my files.

While the jewelry and the various backgrounds made much better pictures than when I started taking photos so many years ago, many of them have defects that I was not aware of at the time and would be shot differently. For example, I cropped some earring shots heavily and am now aware of the horrible noise that escaped me at the time. There are just so many things I have become aware of over the years.

Now that I am 75 and well past when most people retire, I am still loving my daytime job. While my photography is only a very small part of my work, I am finally getting close to okay at it. Now if medical science will just quit fooling around and increase my life span another thirty years, I will have time to get good at it...
 
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These are exceeding well done! It is a lot harder than it looks! I wanted to get a photo of a tanzanite and tsavorite ring.....and utterly failed at it. I didn't want to buy a soft box and fumbled around with lighting. Much better to leave it to experts like you!
 
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Butlerkid said:
These are exceeding well done! It is a lot harder than it looks! I wanted to get a photo of a tanzanite and tsavorite ring.....and utterly failed at it. I didn't want to buy a soft box and fumbled around with lighting. Much better to leave it to experts like you!
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Tanzanite and tsavorite in the same ring, I can only imagine how sweet that is! I once had Oscar Heyman make an incredible ring for me with an oval tsavorite in it surrounded with six smaller canary yellow diamonds and in the small space between the ends of each diamond, a small round brilliant diamond. The shank was 18kt yellow and the heads and gallery work in platinum. I took photos, but it was long before I knew what I was doing. What I would not give to have the opportunity to shoot it again.

My light box cost me two or three thousand dollars fifteen or twenty years ago and was worth every penny. built in lights on all four sides and also in the top and bottom. LOL, it cost me more than the camera I was using at the time.
 
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Wink Jones said:
Tanzanite and tsavorite in the same ring, I can only imagine how sweet that is! I once had Oscar Heyman make an incredible ring for me with an oval tsavorite in it surrounded with six smaller canary yellow diamonds and in the small space between the ends of each diamond, a small round brilliant diamond. The shank was 18kt yellow and the heads and gallery work in platinum. I took photos, but it was long before I knew what I was doing. What I would not give to have the opportunity to shoot it again.

My light box cost me two or three thousand dollars fifteen or twenty years ago and was worth every penny. built in lights on all four sides and also in the top and bottom. LOL, it cost me more than the camera I was sing at the time.
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While in Tanzania, I bought a 1 ct oval Tanzanite and 2 round 1/2 carat tsavorites. A friend set them for me once we were back in the States. Mine ring doesn't sound nearly as striking as yours! I'd post a photo - but it wouldn't look like much! LOL! Excellent work. Would love to see more of your photos!
 
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Butlerkid said:
Would love to see more of your photos!
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LOL, these two photos show that a mind is such a horrible thing to trust. These are the appraisal photos that I took back in 2011 when I updated my client's appraisal. I had an okay photo dome and was taking okay pictures, but...

Oh, and clearly, the small ovals were white and the even smaller rounds were the canary diamonds. (Yes, I know that term is no longer allowed, but hey, I am old and do not care to call them Fancy Intense Vivid Yellow diamonds or whatever the correct designation is these days.

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Within a year or two after taking these photos, I went to a front surface mirror so that there was a single reflection. It would not be until 2015 or 2016 that I started doing the window dressing style that I use now. Funny thing is, I "taught" my assistant how to take and process the photos in lightroom and photoshop and within three days she was putting me to shame. Darn, I really miss her these days. As you can see we processed them at 900 x 900 PPI so they were perfectly sized for my appraisals.
 
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Really a stunning ring with the yellow and white diamonds! The yellow diamonds really complement! Tsavorite is such a brilliant green. Much different than an emerald. More rare, too, I believe.

We used a standard setting for my oval tanzanite between the round tsavorites. Yellow gold shank with white gold prongs. The ring is surrounded by teeny diamonds.

These are nice images, but I can see how much your images have improved since then, in staging, lighting and capture.
 
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Annamaria said:
Jaw dropping! I have never seen an advertisement come close to these. No way I could pick a fave.
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Thank you for your glowing assessment. My head has swollen and I may be trapped in my home office until it goes down a bit.

I will say that both my assistant and I worked very hard to catch some of the dispersion, flashes of colored light, as well as the flashes of brilliance, or white light. It is so very difficult in a static image. In a video, these diamonds literally stand up and dance and shout, "Hey, you, LOOK at ME!" I used a platform called Bombbomb (Yes, I agree, horrible name) to send short videos to my clientele, since I was internet based and doing business all over the world, or at least those parts where I could ship my goods to. Many of my potential clients became actual clients because of those videos and the receipt of the finished pictures, usually received a day before their overnight shipment via Fedex was always a big bonus for my clients. I did all of the videos, including my own excited narration about the spectacular beauty, unless I was out of town and my assistant sent a silent video, as she was not comfortable doing my own often breathless style of narration. She just did not get as emotional about my treasures as I still do.
 
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For those who may have some interest in my setup. This is a picture of my Nikon D7100 attached to my photo box, lights not currently on. The lens is a 105mm prime with a close up filter. The white board covering the lens with a hole in it is because the black camera lens reflects back into the photo, whereas the with the white the black "head shadow" is reduced to a more normal size.

Top quality cutting of a round brilliant diamond takes into the account the obscuration of light from the head of the viewer. In other words, by looking at a diamond to observe the sparkle, the head of the viewer will block some of the light. The closer you get to the diamond, the greater the blockage. This hole allowed me to not have great quantities of black reflections in the diamond, which could make the diamond appear much less magnificent than it is. Not too long after I took this photo I asked a friend if he could make me a white plastic disk that would fit over the top of my lens. (This one is just a foam board with the hole hand cut.) The ones he made for me had perfect circles cut into the plastic and the plastic could simply be cleaned with a damp cloth when they got dirty, rather than needing to be replaced.

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As you can see, I am shooting tethered with the capture software sold by Nikon. It allows me to see exactly what I am going to get on my computer screen and allows me to micro manage the lighting to try to capture some of the flashes of white and colored light that make diamonds so interesting.

This is the position of the camera for my side view shots where I can more easily allow my clients to see the diamond's color. For the "sparkle" shots, I normally attach the camera to the top of the box. I made both stills and videos with the same set up.
 
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It is a good thing I don't live near you! I'd be broke all the time! Are you a jeweler also or do you work with one who creates unique items?
 
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