My friend who asked me to take her portrait a while ago, asked me to help her sell some jewelry on eBay. The only photo she had measured 1"x2" and was part of the appraisal. Of course I couldn't be part of anything using a photo as terrible as that so I told her I would shoot the jewelry for her. Apparently I learn nothing from reading books although I read a lot of them. I didn't want to bring the jewelry home for fear of losing it and I didn't want to go to her place because her dog bit me when I went there to do her portrait so that gave me a 20 minute time frame during lunch to do the shoot. It seemed to me that I had seen books showing jewelry lit with a light tent so I lined a cardboard box with photocopy paper and leaving the camera side open, I fired a flash toward the top right hand corner of the box. I thought the soft light would eliminate glare on the metal which it pretty much did to the extent that the gold lost its sheen giving it a more plastic look. The diamonds look like plain glass and the emerald looks like plastic. I'm quite pressed for time right now so I didn't spend much time in Photoshop with trivialities like color balance but the results impressed the pseudo-client so that's something. However, it really gave me respect for photographers doing this type of work and its now got me obsessed with properly lighting reflective objects. My results are here http://users.imag.net/~lon2251/ebay/braceletCombined.jpg and http://users.imag.net/~lon2251/ebay/ringCompressed.jpg Greg Fraser "Things are never what they seem" - Vlad http://users.imag.net/~lon2251/Gallery
