Bonhomie Jewelry recently asked me for tips on getting great jewelry photos. I was surprised, because some of my jewelry photos look like this:

So-so jewelry photo

It’s not bad – you get the general idea of what the pendant looks like, and you can see that there’s a dark colored round bead, but what you can’t see is that the bead actually is a very dark tiger-eye, with brown and black bands. It looks blah in the photo, when in reality, it’s a beautiful bead (at least I think so anyway).

Then again, some look like this:

Better Photo - Amethyst & Peridot Earring

So what’s the difference between so-so photos that give the basic idea, and great photos that make someone want to see more? I thought about it, and here are the tips I’d give myself (or anyone else wanting to take their jewelry shots from so-so to really good).

1. Lighting – For me, natural light gets the best jewelry photos. This means going outside during the day, and setting up my photos somewhere in the yard where I’m not getting too many shadows. It’s not a scientific process, but I seem to get the best results in direct light, but on a day that isn’t too sunny.
2. Background – unless you are really good at styling photos, a simple background is best. I use cardboard boxes, or a sheet of copper, or something else that is flat and all one color, preferably a neutral color not too close to the color of whatever I’m photographing. I bring a few backgrounds outside with me, and try the jewelry on each one. The copper gets the most great photos, but some pieces end up looking better on another background.
3. If you don’t know anything about shutter speed, aperture, etc, use a camera with a really good auto mode. I use a Nikon D40, and about the only setting I ever change is the flash, to turn it on or off. And the zoom, which I use to get the autofocus t focus where I want it to.
4. Learn about macro mode. On most cameras, it’s the little flower setting, and what it means is that your camera is set to take close-up shots. For point-and-shoot cameras, you probably need this setting in order to get halfway decent photos of small things like earrings. BUT if you have a DSLR, like I do, you might actually get better photos on regular mode, using the zoom to get in really close. With my old camera, a Sony Cybershot (older model, the new ones are probably better) I had to use the macro mode, and messing with the zoom in macro mode was not a good thing. So play with your camera – try non-macro and zoom in close, or use macro and physically move the camera to get as close as you can to your subject.
5. Try a bunch of different angles. My backgrounds are small and easy to move, so I set up the shot, then turn the whole thing around so that I get shots from all sides. I also take some from above and some from the side. I also zoom in on different parts of the jewelry – I’ll zoom in on a stone for one shot, then from the same angle, I’ll focus on a different component.
6. Photo editing: crop well. I am a complete idiot when it comes to photo editing software. Pretty much all I can do well is crop. This is very important – if you want people to look at your photos, crop out all the unnecessary stuff, and crop to the shape that you want. For etsy photos, I crop everything square. I’ll make a couple images that show the whole piece, then maybe crop out everything except some detail I want to show off. (You get five shots on etsy, so I try to get five really good ones, and crop them well so people will want to look at all of them. Then I pick the one that looks best as a one inch square and use that for the first image.)
7. Remember that most of your photos won’t be great ones. That’s why I love digital cameras – I can just delete the bad ones and take more, and it doesn’t cost me anything but time. Sometimes a piece just won’t photograph well no matter what I do, and that can be frustrating, but I’m gradually getting more and more good photos, and less that I have to trash. I usually take at least ten pictures of a piece in one “shoot” and maybe 2 or 3 will be good. If I’m lucky, there will be enough to make five images for etsy, but usually I have to re-shoot once or twice before I’m done. Sometimes even more than that – certain stones, like that tiger eye, are really hard to photograph.