Setting Up for Jewelry Photography

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Michael Seto. In this clip we're going to talk about the basic setup for shooting a piece of jewelry. If we look down at my table here, we've got the beginning elements of the basic setup. You've got the jewelry, a piece of white plexi-glass here which we talked about earlier, we got the camera, a digital SLR set up on a tripod, and we've got here two florescent lamps, they're daylight balanced so that the white balance is close to daylight and you're not getting blue or red tinge to it. So this is a basic jewelry setup. With this you can shoot a basic shot and we're pretty much ready to go. One thing you may want to add though, reflectors. I use a lot of these, they're very useful. I just buy some cardboard at the art store that's silver on one side, white on the other. Silver's going to give a harder reflection, white will give a softer reflection. So what I do to help magnify the light, I just set this up around the piece of jewelry. This is very similar to a shooting enclosure in a way. We showed you the, in one of the other clips, the lighthouse, the light tent, this is very similar to that and it's just a basic setup to shoot jewelry, a couple of lights, a piece of white paper or plexi-glass and a couple of white and silver reflectors along with your camera and tripod. That'll get you started."