Photographing silver jewelry

[rmeixner]

I make sterling silver jewelry (www.robmeixner.com). In order to maintain my website, I also need to be able to take pictures of my jewelry. Silver is a challenge because it is very reflective. I am able to take fairly good, in focus, pictures  with my X10 using light colored backgrounds. I am now trying to use a very black background. The material is black felt typical of a lot of traditional jewelry displays.  I t is very difficult to get my pieces in focus and almost impossible to get the exposure correct. Typically the final product is out of focus, washed out and not usable, especially after I crop the picture. I have no trouble taking portrait, landscape and even very macro pictures of colored objects (flowers, rocks, people, trees etc.), I just can't get good close up pictures of silver jewelry on a black background. Finally, there seems to be white dots in the pictures on black backgrounds that are nowhere in the picture. I went thru the white orb hassle and my camera was actually replaced. I am not a photographer, but it appears that I have to spend a lot of time becoming one if I want to solve this problem. Any suggestions are appreciated...Rob   PS: My google pixel cellphone takes really excellent pictures of jewelry in all kinds of light with any color background.   

[RM_Photog]

Do you know how to use the exposure compensation? The black background is tricking your camera sensor into thinking the photo is too dark. The sensor sees all of that black behind the jewelry and tries to average it out to a medium gray. You need to use negative exposure compensation to turn the exposure back down. You also might have better luck with spot metering if the XT10 has it. 

 

If it's out of focus, you may be trying to put the lens too close to the jewelry. Each lens has a minimum focusing distance. Back the camera up just a little bit and zoom in closer if you have a zoom lens. Try using a tripod to help keep the camera still or prop your arm or the camera up on something like a bag to help stabilize the camera. You could also try macro extension tubes or a dedicated macro lens if you have the budget for it. 

[Florian]

First thing would be, as suggested before, to fix camera position using a tripod, possibly also use a shutter remote to make sure you're not moving the camera by pressing the shutter. Second thing I'd recommend is using the camera's manual focus. Using red coloured focus peaking should be ideal for your use case.

 

If you still prefer to let the camera make the decisions for exposure, set it to spot metering and use the exposure compensation dial.

 

However, you did buy this nice bit of expensive equipment, one of the main features of which is that it allows you to change the camera settings easily when (as all cameras will) it does not make the decisions you want. I recommend making use of this feature.

 

You don't really need a lot of time, take a few hours to research ISO, aperture and shutter speed and how they affect the image and to play around with those settings for a bit, even just a basic understanding of these settings should be helpful and will improve your photography in all situations.

 

As a starting point for your specific use case, I'd recommend setting ISO fixed to some value in the 200-800 range (200 for sharper image, 800 if you want to set highest dynamic range), aperture fixed (this depends on lens, though I'd guess a value in the 4-5.7 range), and varying shutter speed to get the right exposure.

Edited April 2, 2017 by Florian

[mdm]

I guess you hardly need your black background to be out of focus, so set aperture to f4 - f5.6 in order to increase the sharpness.

Edited April 3, 2017 by mdm

[Mike G]

Show us a problem picture!