The Jewelry World Weblog

Creating Soft, Diffused Light

In Basic Photographic Lighting Techniques, I talked about the importance of soft lighting to help the camera show off the shape and texture of a subject. However, shiny subjects such as jewelry, flatware or metallic objects need even more diffused light to avoid harsh, glaring highlights.

For this, you need an even, surrounding light source. A photographic light tent is one way to create the proper conditions for your camera.

Photographic Light Tents

This lighting tool is used often by professional product photographers and commercially-made light tents have become popular with eBay sellers. You’ll see hundreds of these for sale if you do an eBay search for “light tent” in the Cameras and Photos category. Most of them are sold under some variation of the “Cube.” These are essentially small, white, cube-shaped tents with one side open to shoot into with a camera.

I haven’t used one of these small commercial light tents commonly sold on ebay mainly because I’m too cheap to pay for something that’s so easy to make myself.

Any light tent is simply a way to surround your subject with a translucent material which diffuses your light. You then evenly illuminate the outside of the light tent, typically with one light on either side of it. This is almost ideal lighting for photographing shiny stuff like jewelry.

The Milk Jug Light Tent

The simplest and cheapest form of light tent I know for small objects is a milk jug with the bottom cut off (you shoot through the neck or a hole cut in the side), like this…

This will work great for small items.

Moving up in size and cost, some of the things you can use are a large white plastic bowl; a translucent storage container; styrofoam sheets (glued together into a cube shape); a white sheet suspended over and around a table; translucent diffusion panels (you can make these yourself from PVC tubing to form rectangular frames with white cloth stretched over them); or even a large white tent.

My Dollar Store Light Tent

I mostly use a large plastic bowl I bought at a dollar store. It’s big enough for almost anything I shoot.

Jewelry Photography with a Light Tent

Jewelry can be beautiful, but it’s also one of the most difficult subjects for photography. On one small item, you can have many different surfaces such as smooth gold or silver, faceted gems and even textured engraving or filigree. These all reflect and refract light in different ways. And, since light is what we’re capturing when we take a photo, how we light each item will control how the final image looks.

Once again, a small light tent is all it takes in most cases to get jewelry to shine without glare. Here’s a detail shot of a gold necklace I sold a while ago on eBay…

And, I think a blue background worked well for this watch…

A watch such as that also has special lighting needs, mainly because of the flat face of the crystal which can reflect light and obscure the dial.

In this case, I had to carefully place a small spot of black paper inside my light tent, so that would be the area reflected by the crystal.

After I got this image onto my computer, I also sharpened it a bit in order to bring out the fire and sparkle of the diamonds.

Source: http://www.sigma-2.com/camerajim/cjgjewelry.htm

Fast Facts

-   The mineral zoisite was discovered around 1805 in the Austrian area by a Baron for whom it was named. It was usually brown in color, often nearly opaque.

-   The discovery by accident of the tanzanite version, in the late 1960’s was a great surprise in Tanzania Africa, where it was first thought to be sapphire crystals.

-   The name Tanzanite was coined by Tiffany who had first and exclusive rights to the pretty blue violet mineral for many years. 

-   Wearing a well-cut Tanzanite communicates self-confidence, individuality, and maturity. 

-   Its brilliant color and its exclusive origin in Tanzania combine to make Tanzanite a unique and highly sought after gemstone.

Characteristics

Tanzanite is a variety of zoisite. It has naturally occurring shades of blue, green, yellow, pink, brown and khaki but virtually all gemstone quality crystals are heat treated to produce the highly valued shades of sapphire blue, amethyst and blue violet. On Mohs’ scale of hardness, tanzanite is 6.5-7. The prime source of all the world’s tanzanite is in Tanzania near Arusha.

ColorTanzanite has naturally occurring shades of blue, green, yellow, pink, brown and khaki but virtually all gemstone quality crystals are heat treated to produce the highly valued shades of sapphire blue, amethyst and blue violet.

One of the Newest and Bluest of Gems… Tanzanite is the “new kid on the block” of the gemstone kingdom. Discovered in Tanzania in 1967 and introduced to the American market in 1969, tanzanite has catapulted to incredible popularity in a very short amount of time. It was named in honor of the country in which it was found and introduced in the United States for the first time by Tiffany & Co. Available in colors ranging from blue to violet to purple, few gems can rival tanzanite’s depth of hue and purity of color.