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Copyright © Michael Stevens, 2000 - 2004, all rights reserved.
Paint the inside of a cardboard box black. Suspend the piece of jewelry in front of the opening. Wrap tracing paper around the opening, extending out past it.
The cage is aluminum angle iron which is drilled and cut easily. The lights are made with the little track light kits designed to be installed under counters. They are low voltage tungsten (less heat than the big ones, but good only for shots of tiny objects).
The lights are inserted into tubes of aluminum flashing. The tubes are bolted to the frame with an extra piece of angle iron which allows them to be rotated in two directions, rather like a camera on a tripod. A lens can also be inserted into the tubes to convert the lights to spot lights, but we don't use one this time. Adjust the lights so that they shine through the tracing paper onto the piece being shot. Since we have a strongly contrasting background, be sure to use your camera's exposure memory lock or point light metering function to keep the exposure right.
The setup is easily changed by moving the lights around the cage:
You can shoot on a lighter background without the piece casting shadows onto it, yet with freedom of how to light the piece.
Here is a piece of bent clothes-hanger. A little loop is made at a right angle to the diagonal piece that extends upward. Shoot a drop of glue onto the little loop with a hot glue gun. Then put a drop onto the back of the piece of jewelry and press it against the loop. Press for about ten seconds. Later, the glue will peel off metal easily. Here's another view of the attached piece.
You can use this setup inside the box, but here we cover the base with cloth:
Then we shoot the brooch from an angle that hides the diagonal wire.
Because the lens' depth of field is shorter than the diagonal wire, the cloth is nicely out of focus while the brooch is sharp with strong shadows. The shot was lighted from the upper right with weak sunlight, and from the left with a strong incandescent light that was softened by being passed through a piece of tracing paper.
Artificial lights are not the same color as daylight. You can use either a special film or a filter to correct for this. For a digital camera, there will probably be a white-balance control somewhere on the camera. If you are having trouble with focus, increase light level and shoot with aperture priority mode with a smaller aperture. When the aperture is smaller there will be greater depth of field. The little sets of magnifying lenses (available for about twenty dollars) work fine, but a macro lens really does a better job because it will have a greater depth of field, too. It may also be possible to reverse the lens on your camera to get shorter focal length. Macro photography with a digital camera is not always about megapixel resolution -- the lens is sometimes the thing -- at least for use on the web and for small prints. All shots on this page were actually taken with a Sony Digital Mavica FD95; my film camera was used as a model. Email me with questions -- I'll be happy to reply.
