Precious stones are one of the most challenging product photography subjects that we have encountered in the studio. When you photograph jewels you are in a way photographing the set-environment around the gemstone. Gemstones filter and reflect what’s around them. Their sparkle operates through the facet lenses on the stone catching the surrounding light and reflecting and refracting that light to the viewer.
After nearly a year of development and production our catalog of gemstones is quickly becoming it's own stand alone body of work, and one of my favorites. Our new Gemstones portfolio highlights some of our favorite images from the project so far and some of the most technically difficult images from the project.
I would like to write a few blog posts on some tips and tricks we use to take these shots and our methodology for photographing and post processing gemstone photographs. Like a lot of what we do we shot and processed our gemstones on pure white backgrounds, so we could discuss this as well. There are just so many fascinating factors to discuss! Another complicating factor is that photographing rubies has a different set of challenges from photographing sapphires, photographing emeralds, photographing opals, and the list goes on and on. Different precious stones, under the same light, will react in drastically different ways! I hope I find that people are interested in learning more about my take on this classic photography challenge.