Hi everyone! Thought we’d share a few tips on how to take quality photographs of your diamonds and jewelry for web. We know from experience how frustrating it can be to try and capture the life and beauty of your diamonds and jewelry by photograph. So here are a couple of things to keep in mind.

First, we do offer photographing and appraising services for members of this forum. So if you don’t have the time or inclination to try this stuff yourself, we can handle it for you. Click here to find out how.

For the rest of you, first thing to remember is unless you’re shooting for print, it does not need to be perfect. And even then, it is virtually impossible to capture all of the characteristics of a diamond in photograph. Diamond clarity, diamond color, and diamond cut…. forget it. Settle for a crisp shot of the stone (if your posting a loose diamond image), maybe with a coin next to it as a reference for size. For this site especially, the photographs are there to give people the general idea of the item. If someone is interested they’ll probably want to see the diamond or jewelry piece in person. Just make sure that you describe your item truthfully to minimize false expectations and disappointment.

Now, from our experience the best types of jewelry photographs are ones taken by high resolution digital cameras using Macro lens. If you want to go that route, there are photography equipment rental shops that’ll equip you with the camera, lenses and lighting equipment. E.P. Levine (http://www.eplevine.com)for those in the Greater Boston area is a solid source for education and equipment.

Otherwise use what you have at home. If you’re camera isn’t digital, you can always scan your print photographs and digitize the image of your jewelry that way. And speaking of scanning, we’ve seen some pretty decent shots of jewelry and diamonds that people have just scanned. Open the top of the scanner, place the diamond or jewelry piece face down or at an appropriate angle (remember, the scanner is going to capture the image from the glass side). Close the top gently, and if there’s gaps or light coming in b/c the top of the scanner won’t close all the way, you and lay a towel across the whole unit to block excess light.

Finally, for the shot, digital or otherwise, you can set up your background in a number of different ways depending on the look your aiming for and your tastes.

To control the light, we suggest you take 4 pieces of white card board and tape them to each other to form a box with two open sides. Then take black card board or construction paper, put that on the table and cover with glass from a shelf or clear clean unscratched plastic. Place the open ended box you made over the glass with one of the open ends facing the glass and the other facing the camera. Set your jewelry or diamond piece on the glass and shoot at no more than 45 degree angle with flash. The lower your camera angle the “lighter” background is going to appear in the image. The glass/plastic enables light from your flash to reach underneath the diamond or jewelry piece, and defines facets and lines. Now some my prefer to shoot on white background, which is also fine. But it’s more difficult to get the lighting and contrasts correct, from our experience. There are jewelry shooting kits you can buy, but we’ve found the results of this system more than adequate even for professional purposes. So with that, we wish you happy photographing. And if you prefer, we’re more than happy to handle your jewelry photographing for you. Click here to find out how.