How to shoot macro shots of jewelry and shit good ، How to shoot macro shots of jewelry and shit good
Some twat noodle posted on another forum that the best way to shoot jewelry was to use:
1. Tripod
2. White Balance
3. Mirror Lock-up
4. Use camera timer to get your hands off the camera
This is all well and good (however it says nothing about lighting) but there are other ways to get great pics that use opposite techniques such as hand holding, no mirror lockup and normal shutter release.
How you ask? Simple. Use an off camera strobe. The strobe can be a simple speedlight or monolight. The trick is to get it off the camera. You can use a camera connect cord or wireless trigger, but your light, OR THE APPARENT LIGHT SOURCE must appear to come from off camera.
Here’s how I shot all the following photos. All were shot in a variety of settings, both indoor and outside, with no tripod.
1. Light is off camera about a foot from the subject to one side or the other. You can use a bare light or fire it into a softbox or other diffuser, but when working this close, a bare speedlight works just fine.
2. Use a macro lens.
3. Place a white bounce card (or napkin, plate, shirt or any other white surface) opposite the light so that it will "bounce" or reflect the light back onto the subject.
4. Set your camera to manual, aperture to about f/10. Shutter speed doesn’t matter as long as it’s slower than your camera’s sync speed.
5. Shoot a test shot. If the histogram shows that the object is overexposed, dial down the power of your light (or move it farther away), or stop down the aperture a bit. You can also dial down the ISO of your camera to it’s lowest setting.
6. If the histogram shows the photo is underexposed, up the power of your light (or move it closer) or increase the ISO of your camera. You can open up the aperture however your depth of field will decrease.
7. There is no need to use a tripod as the strobe (which fires around 1/8000 or faster) will "freeze" the subject.
8. That’s it. Play with aperture a bit to get more or less depth of field. Also, play a bit with light placement to get different results.
A softbox and larger (wider) aperture was used for this shot. You can see that the light was placed above the ring by the shadow. No bounce card was needed.
This should give you a few ideas. You can use an on-camera light but you should aim it towards a white card placed next to the object and not the object itself. The reason is that the light will appear to come from on side or the other and give the object some depth and detail.
Source of
http://forums.offtopic.com/
