Photography

If you plan on selling your designs, it's important to take good, clear photos of your jewelry. If you're selling online, your customer has only the photos to grab their attention. If they're fuzzy or unclear it could hurt sales.

It make take you a lot of trial and error to find the right method for taking photos of your jewelry, I know this from experience, and I still have trouble! And it's also a time-consuming process. I take photos of every piece I make, and catalog all of them in an inventory database. I want to make sure I have a record of what I've made and what it looked like, just in case I need to look back for something. Plus it's just a nice thing to have to show what I have made and build a portfolio of my work.

A few suggestions of what I have found that works:

  • I've been jealous of other artists who use mannequins to take photos on. I'd love to have a nice standing one, but they are awfully expensive, and I have nowhere to put it! So I did something else instead and found a lower-cost alternative. I purchased this torso from Amazon. So far it has worked really well for me. I'm able to put some of my clothes on it and it works great to take life-like pictures of my jewelry designs on a "person".
  • Use scrapbooking papers for backgrounds. These are an inexpensive way to add some color and style to your jewelry photos. Be careful about the patterns so that you don't use anything that detracts from your jewelry. Find some transparent/frosted sheets of vellum as well to put over the pages too. This works to mute the background.
  • You could buy a photo light box, or you could make your own. I found a foam board tri-fold presentation stand at Walmart and it has turned out to work very well.
  • Get a flash unit for your camera. The flash unit takes more true-to-life photos.
  • Better yet - try to take your photos in daylight…but not directly in sun.

Here are some sites with good information on how to take good photos of your jewelry.

TAKING PHOTOS OF YOUR JEWELRY

Photographing Your Art - nice list of resources from the Crafted Webmaster about taking photos of your work.

Tips for taking Pictures of your Jewelry - From About.com

Tips for Photographing Jewelry - tips from Rena Klingenberg on how to take photos of your jewelry

Inexpensive Jewelry Photography Techniques - Inexpensive Jewelry Photography Techniques - e-book ($12)

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