Jewellery Photography(1), biżuteria
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Jewelery Photography
Copyright © Charles Lewton-Brain 1996
From: ‘Small Scale Photography’
Basic lighting options for jewelery and small object photography
Lights (photofloods)
The kind of lights and lighting that I recommend for our drop shadow system are
photofloods (type B). You can buy these bulbs at many photo stores but you should
shop around: prices vary from 2 dollars to 10 dollars per bulb. They are a pretty
standard item in photo stores that sell to professionals. Tell the camera store staff
you will be using tungsten film.
They are mounted in clamp - on lights, such as you might find at a hardware store,
where there’s a spun aluminum bell and a little clamp - on part to the light socket.
The best quality ones have ceramic sockets, so you should try and find ones with
ceramic sockets if at all possible. The plastic socket kind can overheat, their switches
tend to wear out and they are usually not rated for the high wattage used in
photoflood bulbs - which makes them both dangerous and probably illegal in the
event of a fire.
We will use three main light sources for our system: two 250 watt bulbs and one 500
watt bulb. The 500 watt one is above the shooting surface and the 250 watt ones are
above and on the sides. I recommend buying at least four of the 250 watt bulbs and
three of the 500 watt bulbs and having that many on hand most of the time. It can be
very frustrating to burn out your last bulb in the middle of an important photo shoot
and not have a replacement on hand. We will be using three lights for our system and
that will serve us very well most of the time. When you handle and change the bulbs
use a clean cloth like a handkerchief or cotton gloves like they sell in camera stores.
Grease traces on the bulb can apparently sometimes contribute to bulb failure (note
that if you ever change halogen slide projector bulbs you should treat them the same
way).
Remember to shut off any other sources of light when you are shooting as
incandescent bulbs or fluorescent bulbs nearby can affect the colors you get in your
photographs. Tungsten films do not react well to other types of lights being on at the
same time when you take photographs with them.
The photoflood bulbs in the clamp - on lights are used most of the time with light
diffusion screening such as Mylar® between them and the object being photographed.
Mirrors are used to collect light from the photofloods and so add light to different
parts of the object. Diffusers have been omitted in the following drawing for clarity.
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Light dimmer box: ramping the lights up and down
The light bulbs and your entire lighting system should, if possible, be run through a
light dimmer box. You can buy a light dimmer at the hardware store and construct a
box, or get an electrician friend to do this for you. Remember that the dimmer box
should be rated for the wattage you will run through it to avoid any fire danger. The
reason for having a dimmer box is that we want to ramp the lights up and down. In
my experience it is when you turn the lights on that you blow the bulbs. One tries not
to turn them on suddenly. If you ramp the lights up and down, you’ll find they last a
lot longer, and it’s a lot gentler on them. In addition you want, if possible, to turn the
lights on and off from a single place to make life easier. The dimmer box should be
wired to plugs for the lights. If you use the on/off switches on the clamp - on lights
themselves, they often break after a period of time, so anything you can do to
displace that switching as well as the on/off shock to the bulbs is beneficial.
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Log book
A point about photofloods and professionals: professional photographers will keep a
logbook of their photoflood use, and they will note every minute of running time, and
when that bulb hits 2 hours they scrap the bulbs, even if the bulbs are still
functioning. Now after a lot of experience, I don’t feel this is necessary. I feel that if
you start off with three photoflood bulbs and you just use them, after a little while
you have one old, one new, and one medium, there is a blend of light qualities and it
all works out. I have yet to see any disturbance in color temperature from not
keeping a log book and not trashing my bulbs every few hours. I use the bulbs until
they die and then change them. This lowers your overhead. A professional
photographer told me once that when bulbs are tested more sensitive films than
normal are used and so in real life it doesn’t make as much difference as one might
think.
While not a log book as such I strongly recommend keeping a note book and pen next
to your shooting area to note your observations and experiences in. This will help you
better understand what you are doing and help keep you out of trouble when similar
problem situations crop up more than once.
Mirrors
A major part of our system, and what makes it an extremely good one, is the use of
mirrors. I like swiveling shaving mirrors which cost two or three dollars each. You
can also use the kind of make - up mirror that enlarges things on one side and on the
other there is a regular reflection. Make sure that the rim on the mirror is silvery or
white as colored rims can reflect in your work. These kinds of mirrors are very useful
for our purposes. I have some 15 to 20 mirrors in various sizes around my own set -
up. The photofloods and mirrors will be all you need in lighting equipment to obtain
good results. Mirrors used should be stable and easy to tilt and position. They should
also not move after you position them. The mirrors catch hard light falling from the
sides of the clamp - on lights and give us miniature spotlights on the object. It is the
mirrors that allow us to model light on the object and obtain results equal to or better
than those available with professional photographic lighting equipment costing
thousands of dollars.
This is all antique technology. This is how they made the original 1920s The
Hunchback of Notre Dame; they used mirrors to shine the light, and it’s something
that photographers these days have forgotten about to some extent, but it’s
extremely useful, particularly for the small scale objects that we’ll be shooting.
I often use the mirrors in ranked layers, one behind and perhaps above the next so
both can be used. I also have mirrors that drop down from the ceiling; I have mirrors
everywhere I can put them. I like microscope mirrors too, small ones which I then
mount so that they can swivel. You can buy them at a flea market, and these can sit
right on the shooting surface to direct light onto your object.
Several additional options that can sometimes be useful follow.
Projectors
A source of light that I sometimes use for my photo - booth is slide projectors. Slide
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projectors have the correct color temperature light for the type of film that we’ll be
using. If you go to a flea market you can buy a functional older slide projector for 5 or
6 dollars - often they are the type of slide projectors that have the slides organized in
a long rectangular tray. They’re such a pain to use that people are happy to get rid of
them and they’re very cheap. When one considers that the bulbs alone used to run
about $25.00 each it is a pretty good deal. So, if you can buy a slide projector
inexpensively, mount it onto some kind of tripod, then that too becomes a light for
our system. One can mask parts of the lens with dark paper to create ‘stripes’ of light.
Occasionally a slide projector provides a great ‘feed’ of hard light to a mirror or may
be bounced off a white surface onto an object as a ‘fill’ light to illuminate a dark
portion of a piece.
Quartz - halogen work lamps
There are now quartz - halogen ‘work lamps’ available at hardware stores for
between fifteen and thirty - five dollars which gives you a photo lamp that several
years ago a photographer would pay three or four hundred dollars for. They have
more or less the same color temperature as photofloods. They tend to be rather
bright though and I don’t use them for the small scale system we are talking about,
more for larger objects outside of the photo - booth or for shots of rooms. For larger
objects however they can be a very cost - effective addition to photographic lighting
for tungsten films.
Daylight photofloods (blue bulbs)
An option that some people use for photography instead of the tungsten photofloods
is daylight balanced photofloods, often called ‘blue bulbs’. These are bulbs intended
for daylight film types rather than the tungsten film that I recommend. The main
advantage here is cost: the tungsten film costs more than daylight film. However,
blue bulbs (and blue filters) cut down on the amount of light that reaches the film and
this may affect the capabilities of your system. Again, choose a system, learn it and
live with it.
Blue filters
Instead of using the blue bulbs, it is also possible to use a blue filter on your camera
lens, which allows you to use tungsten lighting with daylight film. Some people really
like the option of being able to use daylight film. This is a pretty inexpensive way of
having the flexibility of both options with your photo system. I don’t have one and it
is not something that I do because I like to stick to a single film type to avoid
surprises, but it may be useful for you to know about at some point. At the photo
shop ask for the filter that allows you to shoot daylight film using tungsten
photoflood (3200K) bulbs. In the Kodak Wratten system this would be an 80A
correction filter. This requires an exposure increase of about two f-stops
(Collins, p
64).
The reason some people like the daylight film option (besides the ability to use
Kodachrome) is because they prefer to shoot color print film of their work which can
be processed rapidly almost anywhere and is relatively inexpensive. In practice I
personally don’t find color prints that useful when compared with slides.
If I need to have color prints then slides can be easily duplicated onto color print film.
As well, good prints can be made from slides at most photo shops and there is always
the option of having a laser - scanned color photocopy made from a slide. If on the
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other hand you do have color prints you want slides of you can get fairly good results
by taking slides of the color prints themselves using the principles of a horizontal
copy set - up (described later).
Fiber - optic lights
If you have an extra couple of hundred dollars around I strongly recommend
obtaining one or two fiber optic light sources as well. They can be purchased from
gemology suppliers. They provide several settings of a tungsten - halogen intense
spotlight on a long gooseneck that can be twisted and positioned fairly close to a
small object. The end of the ‘light pipe’ or gooseneck is about ½” across. They are
very pleasant to have around and enable some really accurate spotlighting and
elimination of shadows on a piece. I don’t have one of my own but I use them
whenever I have them available.
My Recommended Lighting Pick for Beginners:
Until you have some experience I suggest my recipe for basic success: 3 photoflood
bulbs, one large one above, two of less wattage on the sides, diffusion screens on all
of them and use 64 ISO tungsten film (don’t bother using blue bulbs, daylight film
etc. for a bit). This is what I use.
Again, whatever you do, set up a strict system, and live with it, and that way you’ll
get the best results.
Basic Photographic Equipment for Jewelery and other Small objects
Cameras
We are assuming you have a 35 mm camera. You will need a ‘single lens reflex’ (SLR)
camera with a ‘through the lens’ metering system (TTL). This type of camera allows
you to see through the viewfinder what will be recorded on the film. It also allows
you take reflected light meter readings from your object through the camera lens. My
favorite is a manual Nikon camera: I have a Nikon F2. There’s also an FM2. An F3 is
supposed to be good too. I think it is important to have a manual camera, because if
you have a camera that’s all automatic, a couple of things happen. One is that the
camera lies to you (the camera thinks it sees the correct light reading for your
photograph, and it is wrong) and you may end up with bad shots, and the second is
that I have the impression that automatic cameras may be a little bit easier to break
if you drop them, whereas with many manual cameras, you can actually drop them on
the floor, and most of the time they survive - not that you want to drop them on the
floor, but sometimes such things happen. If getting an automatic camera, make sure
it has a manual mode that lets you have full control over the f-stop used, time of
exposure and ISO setting (some new automatics set the ISO when you load them by
reading the bar code on the film canister).
Manual cameras are getting harder to find, so this means looking in the used market.
You can pick up a used F2, F3 or FM2, probably for about 300 to 350 dollars if you
look. Other cameras are acceptable as well. I suggest you ask a number of
photographers what camera they like and why before making a decision, that is of
course if you don’t just get a Nikon F2 like I have. Bobby Hanson (a photographer,
artist, author and blacksmith) says that many other types of cameras do not center
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