Capturing Brilliance

There is nothing that stops you in your tracks quite like a stunning photo of a piece of beautiful jewelry. However, capturing this natural beauty is no walk in the park.Factors like light, color, and clarity get in the way of virtually displaying what a piece looks like in real life.

To give you a behind-the-scenes view at capturing these brilliant pieces, I’m going to take you with me to take a photo of some amazing rings, custom made by our goldsmith, Lizzie.

1. Analyzing the Pieces
These are the three pieces I picked. I wanted to use only rings for consistency and simplistic setup. The first thing I think about when looking at all three rings is what color background to use. Bright colors can make the colors pop, but are hard to match with the pieces.

I usually like to use a neutral background color to let the rings speak for themselves. For this photo, I have chosen the goldsmith bench, both for its neutral color and its ties to Lizzie.

2. Setting up the Shot
When working with gemstones, angles are imperative to get correct. You want to make sure you can see different parts of the rings, at different angles for each. Some rings can stand up by themselves, but others need the help of a little well placed hot glue (don’t worry it doesn’t hurt the jewelry!). This glue will be edited out at the end.



3. Lighting 
Brace yourselves, this is the hardest part. You would think gemstones, known for capturing and dispersing light, would be easy to harness in a photo. Wrong. At least 3-4 light sources are recommended to illuminate the stone from different angles, as you would see it in real life. Here is what the photo looks poorly lit versus properly lit. But, we’re not done yet.



4. Editing
Finally, we have the photo and we are ready to put the finishing touches on our beautiful rings! Changing the warmth is the easiest way to portray how the rings look in real life, this photo is a little too cold at present. After a few more color edits, I am ready to airbrush away that ugly glob of hot glue. Voila, we have a finished photo!



Now all of this is not to trick or give an illusion that any of the jewelry looks better online. Rather, it is to show how much work goes into displaying these beautiful pieces that mean so much to all of us. Not many people know that 100% of the photos we publish are taken in-store by our jewelry photographer. Now that’s passion!

If you want to verify that these photos do indeed accurately portray the real pieces, by all means stop in and try them on yourself. We would love to show them to you!