Jewellery Photography: Advanced Techniques for Capturing Sparkle & Detail
Capturing Sparkle, Shine and Everything Fine
When it comes to purchase, jewellery imagery needs to connect with people emotionally.
It takes technical expertise and a creative touch to ensure the finer details are on display.
From the subtle gold gradients, to the refraction from a flawless facet, we’ll capture your jewellery in a way that excites and creates desire. That’s our job.
Jewellery is Reflective, Lighting is Everything
Lighting jewellery is not for the faint of heart. There’s no avoiding a technical deep dive to do it well.
By creating many images for many tastes over many years, we’ve become competent.
We take these details into consideration…
Type
How we light gold, is different to how we light diamonds, which is different to how we light pearls.
If a piece has all three, it requires a pretty complex lighting setup.
Setups aren’t always the same, we tailor them to suit every piece.
Shape
Jewellery reflects everything around it. It’s important to approach our lighting setup in a way that produces flattering reflections that complement the piece.
For example, a pearl is beautiful and round. We light pearls with round shaped lighting rather than square shaped lights. This avoids un-shapely square reflections with right angles and pointy corners. A round circular light leaves a fitting round reflection on the pearl, which enhances and complements its shape.
While this sounds like common sense, you’d be surprised at how unforgiving jewellery is to light. Even when you “know the right way”, it’s a game of millimetres, careful observation and feeling your way to the finished result.
Background
The space around the jewellery will affect how the light hits it and what reflects in it. It could be dark and moody, or vibrant and colourful, clean and minimalistic or with intricate props. All of which, will influence how we approach our lighting setup.
Or it could be as difficult as no background at all – pure white.
But how could something on white be so difficult? This is because there’s no context to make sense of the reflections in the jewellery and why they exist. We have to create reflections that don’t draw attention to themselves. They need to look perfect and unnoticeable at the same time.
The simpler the scene, the more technically difficult. It’s why we get asked to take this type of imagery so often. Because it’s hard. You need to know what you’re doing.
Jewellery Imagery Styles
1. On Model
On model jewellery photos feature a model’s face, neck, hands, or body. It adds the human element and gives your customers an idea of how it would feel being worn.
Photos with models are usually used for marketing and advertising purposes and are often a buyers first encounter with a product.
The model matters. Using professional models make for a successful photoshoot. They are confident in front of the camera and comfortable in their own skin. This is the feeling you want in your jewellery imagery and is an investment worth making.
We can either arrange the perfect model for you or you can do that yourself. Just note that finding a less experienced model with the motivation of costing less, rarely saves you money at the end of the day. We’re big fans of “do it once, do it right”.
2. Creatively Styled
Creatively styled jewellery photos include numerous elements including backgrounds, surfaces, creative lighting and props.
Stylistically, they can vary between minimalistic or complex. We can spend an hour or up to a day on a creatively styled image depending on the complexity of the photography brief.
This style of imagery can be used to tell a story about a campaign or range you’re promoting.
Great for website banners, sale campaigns, paid ads, print advertising and socials.
3. Elevated Ecommerce
Much simpler than Creatively Styled, but still very elegant is Elevated Ecommerce. We use subtle additions of backgrounds, surfaces, and lighting, with minimal styling.
These images give your jewellery an extra bit of ‘oomph’ over the traditional Classic Ecommerce imagery. This is because they feel more like a real photo, as opposed to the pure white cut out background images, which can make you subconsciously unsure if something is real or rendered.
These images can be used for your online store. They’re also great for social media as they have more “mood” than Classic Ecommerce.
4. Classic Ecommerce
No distractions, 100% pure detail, the clearest view of all intricate details.
Classic Ecommerce jewellery images are delivered with deep etched pure white backgrounds. We also supply transparent background versions. Graphic designers love these for their flexibility.
Contrary to popular belief, this imagery type is technically the hardest to produce. It requires the most expertise to do well and therefore is not the cheapest.
These images are often the final look a buyer will get at their desired piece of jewellery, concluding the process of the buyer’s journey.
5. Video
Jewellery is reflective, sparkly and shiny. Whilst we can capture this in a photo, moving imagery can be even more engaging and make for a spectacular visual.
Video and photo styles are not mutually exclusive. We have the ability to apply all the above styles into a moving video format too.
Many jewellery photoshoots we do now involve a combination of photos and videos to round out the marketing campaign.
View a 3-part behind the scenes series and the finished product showing what went into the making of the Crescendo campaign video for Nina’s Jewellery…
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Crescendo
View our Jewellery Photography Portfolio to explore more examples.
Get in touch
If we feel like a good fit for your jewellery photography and video dreams, we’d love to hear from you.
