So, after editing the store front pics (soon to come in another post) I got down to lighting the three pieces of jewelry that cost more than my yearly rent and electricity combined. So, how does one light such an elegant and costly subject? With a piece of paper I rescued from the garbage, of course! I was just going to try this out for experiment's sake, but it ended up working really well, so I went with it.
Use What You Have At Your Disposal
Basically, I took the piece of paper, wrapped it into a cone shape and stuck it down to the desk with a little Blu Tack ® (you really need some of this stuff, really). I also used the Blu Tack ® to make the heart and earrings sit the way I wanted to add some interest. Here's a shot of the jewels in the cone.
The one main disadvantage to working in a cone, is that you either need to have skinny little monkey arms (which I don't) or you need to use something like a Wacom pen to push things around. Luckily I convinced myself I needed an Intuos 4 a few months ago, so that was that problem solved. The pen came in really handy when I had to get the chain adjusted just right. You may think I just laid it down like that and, VIOLA! But, no, I adjusted every link on the chain to get the perfect wave.
Shining A Light On A Heart
Now, the lighting. In retrospect, I would have maybe thrown a little more light in from the front, slightly camera right to fill in those two black holes in the front of the heart and the one dark ruby on the right earring, but all in all I'm happy with the final result. I used two flashes, one on either side and both adjusted for roughly the same light output. It wasn't too scientific, as the two flashes have different power and one was closer than the other. Here you can see the setup with the tripod, the Vivitar 285 on the right coming in low and the Pentax 360 on the left up higher.
I messed around a bit with the position of the lights until I had sufficient glow in the stones. By coming in low with the Viv and high with the pentax I was able to bathe the whole piece in nice soft light which made the piece look as though it was glowing from within. I added a bit of light to the front by setting up a silver reflector to bounce some of the Vivitar's extra light back in. This killed any shadows I had showing up in the front underneath the pieces and also gave the front stones a little more kick. As I said before though, I should have added another light source from front / camera right to knock out those black holes. This is an image showing the reflector at work, and also shows the Haruki Murakami books I used to squish the cone in to make it a bit taller inside. If you like funky crazy books, you can't go far with Haruki Murakami.
Don't Forget The Little Details
Now, the only thing about shooting such a detailed object at such a long focal length is that you really start to lose detail due to a shallow plane of focus. I was shooting at f/16 and the focal plane was really only about one inch. That's all well and good if you're going for some artsy bokeh, but I needed to convey the intricacies of this beautiful piece by showing lots of detail.
This is where focus stacking comes to the rescue. I took five shots, one focused on the front, and then consecutively further back. This got the front, the middle, each earring and the middle of the chain. Then I took those five images, after adjusting my levels and all, into Photoshop to blend the parts of the image which were in focus. And if you want to see how I did that you'll have to tune in next time!
