Camera Settings for Jewelry Photography

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Michael Seto and in this clip we're going to talk about the proper settings to use on your digital SLR for jewelry photography. So we've got here a Nikon D200. When you're shooting jewelry, there's a number of things you need to be thinking about with your camera settings. Number one is your film speed or ISO. You want to be as low as possible, in this case I'm going to use ISO one hundred. That gives you the most detail and the least noise. Since you're shooting in a controlled environment, you can adjust the light, it allows you to go to a lower ISO. The second thing you want to think about is your aperture. That's going to control how much depth of field or how much of your piece of jewelry is in focus. You will tend to want to go with a smaller aperture, which gives you more depth of field, so something say thirteen or sixteen, you may even want to go up towards twenty-two although I don't like going that high because sometimes you'll get some, the light defracts a little bit and it makes the picture a little fuzzier. So you want to think about your ISO, you want to think about your shutter speed, as well you want to shoot manual. Don't use the program mode. Shoot on manual and you'll have to work out through trial and error, what your, the proper shutter speed is. So, you've got your shutter speed, your aperture, you want it higher, your film speed you want it lower and those are some of the key settings on your digital SLR for jewelry photography. "