Jewelry Photography & Lighting

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Michael Seto. I'm a New York based professional photographer and today we're going to talk about the different kinds of lighting that you might use for shooting jewelry. Down here on the table, we've got a number of different lighting options. It all really depends on what your budget is. A lot of this you can just get at Home Depot or around the house, some household lamps. You can be very flexible. Lighting for jewelry can be very simple. Window lighting, a couple of lamps from the house, or it can be very complicated. You can rent some beautiful strobes and other specialized lighting from a photographic store. Let's just talk about a couple of things real briefly. What we've got here is just a florescent lamp, you can also put a incandescent bulb in there, it's very basic. Florescent is good because the lighting is a little cooler. So you're not sweating and just doesn't generate a lot of heat and you can leave it on for long periods of time. The other one I've got here, I've got a small LED bulb inside here. It's got multiple LED's. That's often good to bring out sparkles in faceted gems like diamonds and that sort of thing. These are both continuous light sources so the light is always on. The other light source I want to talk about is flash. That's these here. You can use your regular on camera flash to light up the jewelry as well as some studio lighting. This gets plugged in and on a light stand and those deliver a one flash of light onto the jewelry. So those are some of the basic pieces of jewelry lighting you can do. Ranged from simple to complicated, economical to expensive."