Managing Equipment Reflections in Jewelry Photography

Video Transcript

"Hi. It's Michael Seto here. In this clip we're going to talk about how to manage reflections on the surface of the jewelry that you're photographing. Very important. Let's take a look down at what we're shooting today. It's a nice watch, but look at this. We've got this very shiny white gold or platinum surface as well as the glass. The glass is very, very reflective. It's going to reflect anything around it. So how are we going to manage something like that? First of all, you're going to have to defuse the lights. To manage reflections from your lights, if you're not using the light tent, you're going to need a piece of diffusive material to put in front of the light, between the light and the object you're shooting. Something like this. Some light silk or white cloth. This is actually something I got out of a packing box so I don't know exactly what it is, but it works perfect. So, what you're going to do is just gaff tape this, gaff tape. Gaff tape is gaffer tape. It's a tape that a lot of photographers use but doesn't leave sticky residue on. Don't use duct tape because you'll get sticky stuff everywhere. So, you're going to, I'm going to gaff tape a couple of these diffusion material onto my lights and that's going to be the first step in managing the reflections. The reflections from my lights tend to be the most important one because they will stand out the most on a piece of reflective jewelry. So if you've got glass or very reflective metal, you really want to manage those reflections in taking a good shot of jewelry."