OK so, you've just spent hours on your masterpiece, and you're ready to add it to your catalogue, so you whip out your snappy little digital camera and maybe pose it artfully on a pretty rock, and you take a photo, and it looks terrible!

I see so many jewellers let themselves and their skills down by showing off beautiful objects with absolutely terrible photographs, and i'm going to help you all fix that in this thread with some handy hints.

1. BUY A TRIPOD
i am not even joking, it doesn't matter if you're taking your photos with a pro level digital SLR or some £40 snappy thing you bought on a whim from asda, a tripod is essential for a good photograph.

2. BUY A GOOD CAMERA.
though this step is a lot more optional than you'd think, a good camera can help. if you're proud of your creations, why not get a proper tool for the job? a good entry level dSLR camera will run you about £200 nowadays, and you don't need anything but the standard lens that comes with it.

3. USE MACRO MODE
Macro mode adjusts the camera's autofocus to work with things really close up to the camera (like say... jewellery!) the macro icon looks like this: sometimes it's on a dial on the camera, sometimes you have to hunt through the menus, but i have not seen a recent camera that doesn't have this. you can set it all up manually too but if you know how to do that then i doubt you need this guide. turn it on, use a tripod, and you'll get pin sharp images.

4. DO EVERYTHING IN YOUR POWER TO AVOID USING THE FLASH
seriously. turn it off. it surrounds your piece with a horrible shadow and blows all the surface detail out. use other lighting sources, which brings me to:

5. LIGHTING
there's no real right way to do it, just get a couple of anglepoise lamps, or a torch, candles, heck anything that emits light and position them around the scene until you're happy with how it looks. bounce lights off tinfoil, white paper, any colour paper, shine it on directly from the sides, back. have a fiddle! i've found myself in the bathroom with my scene set up on a stool in the bathtub because of how the light scatters off white tiles but you don't have to be that drastic

following these tips can turn your photos from this sort of quality:


to this sort of quality:


well, that's about it, i hope this was of help to somebody =D