How to take a picture of jewelry?

Question

I have to sell some jewelry on ebay and need to take a good picture of it. Everytime I snap a picture it looks all blurry and the brightness of the stones is all shiney. I have an excellent digital camera too I just dont know how to use it quite frankly. photographing diamonds.

I HAVE A CAMERA. PLEASE READ THE ENTIRE QUESTION BEFORE YOU POST AN INSULTING ANSWER. I FELT GOOD REPORTING YOU LAYLA, GET A LIFE.

Answer 1

Try using a tripod. I also would use natural lighting when doing this type of photograph. When uploading photo you only need the lowest settings. 640x480.

If you need more help email me!

Answer 2

Use your macro setting and experiment. Let's say you have a point and shoot camera with macro and a flash on the camera. You might have to go to a manual mode to do this, but...

Put your ring on a nice background surface. I like to just put it in a ring box. Zoom out at least half-way so that you will be working about a foot away from the ring. Be sure that you get focus confirmation. Shoot a picture USING flash. Check the LCD for the result. If you have overexposed the ring, use the EV adjustment to reduce the exposure. For small items, I often find that I need to reduce the exposure by about 1.0 EV. (That's -1.0 EV.) It is better to have the ring properly exposed and the background underexposed, so just worry about the ring for now. Using a deliberate underexposure will cure the "too shiny" appearance of the stones.

If you know how, you can use either full manual exposure or just Aperture Priority and choose a smaller aperture (larger number) to make the ring show up in better focus.

If you have a DSLR, post your question again stating the kind of camera that you have and the lens that you are using and we will give more details.

If you are doing any image processing at all, such with Photoshop or it's cousins, you can crop the image to 800 pixels by 800 pixels and use Supersize images on eBay. I always use the Picture Pack when I am selling anything of any value.

Check out http://www.members.aol.com/swf08302/heartring.jpg which I did a while ago using a Nikon Coolpix 5400 exactly as described above. I do NOT think this is acceptable, but we decided not to sell the ring anyhow, so I didn't bother to do a better job. It's still better than some I've seen. I don't keep old photos of sold items around, so I don't have much to show you, but at least you know that it's possible to get an acceptable result even without spending huge dollars on your equipment.

The key things to remember are:
-Macro setting
-Zoom out to get about a foot away from your subject
-Use flash
-Try different EV settings and expect that you will end up with a negative EV setting, such as -1.0 EV.

Answer 3

Have it sitting in a lot of light & turn off the flash on your camera. I have a digital too & that's what I had to do. I had to take a bunch of pictures of stuff for my Dad cause he's going to be selling it on ebay too. Also, once you load the pictures onto a computer you'll have to re-size & sharpen...I believe there's a limit on the size of the picture.

A good program I use for resizing, sharpening & reducing red-eye on my digital pictures is a free one I got off the internet called IrfanView.

Answer 4

Use a tripod. Turn on the macro mode of your camera (macro photogrpahy is when you take picture in close). Don't use a flash. Instead, place a bright light source with shade over it above the item.

Answer 5

turn off the flash on ur camara and keep the jewelry in a area with good light and take the photo...if the light shines on the jewelry use some kind of a paper or cloth to cover the light to make a mat-light and use that light source

Answer 6

try to with dimmer lights on the diamonds, too much lights will surely reflects all lights back to the diamonds.

Answer 7

Via camera.!!

Answer 8

get a camera take the picture dumb butt