How to Photograph Jewelrys step 4

4.1 Aperture

- Also known as f-number. This setting widens or narrows the lens, limiting the amount of light that comes into the camera. This directly affects shutter speed, and film sensitivity (since we're using digital camera, film sensitivity is adjustable like anything else).

This setting is responsible for the 'focal length'. With high f-number eg f/22 or f/11, when taking jewelry photographs, parts that are close to camera will be focused as well as parts that are further away. With low f-number, eg f/2, only the focused part will be in-focus, and parts of jewelry that are further apart or closer to the camera will become fuzzy. Use this setting as it suits you. You may want to create certain effect, but if you don't, keep this setting to f/11. Overdoing this setting will limit the light coming into the camera, and you'll have to make sacrifices elsewhere to compensate.

4.2 Sensitivity

- Also known as ISO number. This used to be film property, and expressed in numbers like ISO200, ISO400, ISO800 etc. The higher the number, more sensitive the film, less light it needs, and thus more expensive. In Digital SLR's this is merely just a setting, but the higher the number, more noise camera will capture. The more light you have, you can go lower with this number. For our limited lighting, ISO800 or ISO1600 will be fine, but try not to use ISO3200 -- it adds visible noise.

4.3 Shutter Speed

- Also known as exposure, it is a measure of time camera will be taking the light. When photographing moving objects, you would want this fairly short: 1/200 or or 1/400. However, we're taking static objects, and with the tripod camera is static as well. This gives us flexibility in going as low as 1/30 or 1/10, or even 1/2. Value 1/2 means that camera takes light from the object for half a second. If anything moves during that half a second, photograph will be blurred.

Adjust shutter speed freely until you get desirable effect. In fact, when taking photographs of jewelry against white background, you will want photos over-exposed. Over-exposure should affect only the white background, where small imperfections of white surface will vanish into pure white. If your camera has light meter, it will display a warning that you have too much light, number 2 or 2.5 could be flashing in your viewfinder. This is good :-) .

If your background is black, you'll want it under-exposed. This will keep the black background black, remove some imperfections, but leave the jewelry just fine.

4.4 White Balance

- With different colours present in every light source, our eyes naturally adjust to what white is. Cameras try to do the same and for general photography are quite good at it. However, for jewelry, you'll want to try all manual pre-sets yourself and chose best result. If everything fails, manually adjust white balance, until it's good. You won't need to keep changing this setting from one jewelry piece to another.

4.5 Focus

- Jewelry is static. It's easy to use manual focus, but auto-focus seems to work just as fine. If camera keeps focusing on the incorrect part, just switch to manual, and away you go. For most applications, auto-focus will be fine though.

4.6 Taking photographs

- Take enough photographs for each peace. Use camera built-in display as a guide only. Colors and brightness will look slightly different on the computer screen. You can adjust some of it afterwards, but try to take a perfect shot in the first place.