Great lighting is absolutely critical to show your work in the best possible way. You have to properly illuminate the foreground and the background of your jewellery pieces in order to give the best visual representation of your work and get more sales as a result. Before getting ahead considering the various lighting options some tips are essential to know in order to drive out the maximum benefits out of any of these methods. Some of these tips are given below,
- Clean the piece of jewellery properly for a neat effect. Getting out fingerprints and smudges really brings out the shine. Use a long free cloth to wipe the jewellery piece and make sure that you don’t leave any fingerprints in this process. So, using tongs and finger coats or latex gloves is advised to handle the jewellery piece properly.
- Keep the piece on a flat surface and keep the light source just at the edge of the camera line. Observe and set the light source accordingly so as to not create any shadows or reflections in the foreground. You can use reflectors to maximise the light effect. Even clean, plain white paper cutouts can be used as reflectors.
- Be prepared to spend some time in experimentation. Digital tools really allow you to do that without a lot of money. So, take lots of shots,experiment with all those different factors and you’ll achieve great results.
Now when you have finalised the position or place where you are going to shoot, you can move on with the next step of choosing the right kind of light source. To find the right choice is the most important part of your shoot as lighting plays out a significant role in this process. Lighting brings out the extravagance of the jewellery piece. This helps make the piece tempting for the buyers and also lets admirers appreciate the sheer beauty of the beautiful creation. We’ll look into two kinds of lighting arrangements that bring out the jewellery to its glory.
LED photography has come a long way in the last few years. All indications suggest that LEDs will be the future of great photographic and video lighting. The real question that arises is what is the difference between LED lighting and strobe or flash lighting? Why would one use one instead of the other?
Flashes, also known as strobes, do not stay on, all the time. When you are using flash as your light source, the duration of that flash would be anywhere from an average of one-thousandth of a second to as fast as one-ten thousandth of a second or more. Most cameras will synchronise with the flash with a shutter speed anywhere from one-sixtieth of a second to one-three hundredth of a second. Cameras which support higher sync speeds will go even higher. Here flash duration means the amount of time the flash is outputting light. It is always very fast. Sync speed is the fastest shutter speed that your camera can work with flash.
In simple terms, the faster shutter that will allow your camera shutter to open and the flash to fully illuminate your subject or scene before the shutter begins to close. The brightness of the flash units combined with their extremely fast speed makes flash a great solution in situations where you need to be able to spot fast action. Flash is also ideal for situations where you want to overpower ambient light like the sun and have your subject appear brighter than the natural setting. It is also ideal for situations where you need or want to use artificial lighting, but you can’t place it close to your subject.
The higher powered flashes will be able to reach and light your subject more efficiently. Speedlight strobes work in batteries or AC power and whereas studio strobes generally are designed to work on AC power but many new brands will work on replaceable batteries. Speedlights are generally silent except when they pop during the flash whereas studio strobes have fans, which add a noise factor to your shoot. You can also find more modifier strobes. You will also need a trigger to fire your strobes remotely and a flash meter is the best way to set exposure.
Constant LED lights don’t flash. They remain on all the time. So what you see is what you get. This can be a great asset for beginners to lighting or even advanced professionals who are working with very intricate lighting setups. While the bigger studio strobes do come with constant modeling lights. The modeling lights will only approximate what will happen when the flash fires. They don’t give you a truly accurate representation of the lighting. LED lights frequently have the built in ability to modify the colour temperature from tungsten to daylight balance. Now while this is a very useful feature, it does come at the cost of reduced brightness.
LED lights are generally much lighter than studio strobes and even some speedlights. They generate very little heat, if any and make no noise, since they don’t require fans. LEDs are generally AC powered but many have the ability to run off readily available Sony and Canon batteries. Because of the continuous light you can use your camera’s light mirror to set exposure and you’ll not need a trigger to use these lights remotely. Strobes tend to be more powerful. But ultimately the output depends on a lot of factors, the distance between the subject and the light source determines a lot about your photo, the location etc.
The straight fact is that you won’t find one light suited to all kinds of situations that you’ll encounter as a photographer. Both the lighting arrangements have their pros and cons. For beginners, continuous lights or LEDs are better as they allow the photographer to actually see what he/she is doing. It will definitely help in honing lighting skills much faster. All the aspects need to be considered before making the choice. Hope this will help you make an informed decision to get the best results.