I thought I'd do a little experiment, to photograph a jewelry very low value essentially fake jewelry. So I bought two jewelry a ring and a pendant from a store that sells very cheap jewelery . Most likely not even made from metal but of hard plastic , certainly, however the stones are plastic ! The purpose of this experiment is to find out if such a cheap jewelry when photographed in a professional studio and after process the photo of them, it may seem like a regular jewelry that costs multiples times its actual value. The cost of both jewelery did not exceed 10 euro, about $ 7
For photographing the ring using two flashes. The ring was placed lying on a flat surface on which I stuck a piece of matte paper. Behind and above the ring, I placed a diffuser 45 degree angle and back of it you can find a flash with a simple reflector and honeycomb grid. The second flash, wears a shtrip softbox and I have placed it over the camera and angle Joined round 30 degrees.
The main light should come from the back flash and the front will play the role of fill in flash. To confine the black reflection of the camera in the ring, placed in front of the lens a bit savage translum with a hole for the lens. In this photo shoot, i am using the tilt motion of the lens to have focused around the front part of the ring with a single shot.
Shoot specs: Hasselblad DB | F: 16 | ISO: 50 | Fujinon 100mm
The result after one hour post production is quite good. I believe that this photo could easily catch someone, that this ring is worth more than 50euro!
Post update:
I photographed also the pendants which I bought along with the ring. The study of lighting is similar with micro changes. The camera angle is changed whereby the softbox now lies below the plane of the lens. Instead of the savage translum that I used in the ring shoot, here I use a piece of kapa mount white mat with a hole for the lens. As in the previous shoot and in this, I used the tilt feature of the camera to have all the jewelry focused on a single frame. The total length of the pendant is 25 cm.
The only peculiarity in making the pendant shoot is that I used three different shots, one with a mirror left of the pendant, so that I have extra light left in the chain and the central stone of the jewelry, one with the same mirror right one without mirrors.
After processing all three photos this is the final result.
