Jewellery photo shoot, or how to play a dirty trick on a photographer...
"True beauty cannot be captured with a photographic lens; it is too live and wrong, too changeable. Or maybe it is that real beauty is perceived not with eyes, but somehow differently?!»
Boris Akunin
Of course, it is much more pleasant to see an alluring sea shore, pre-dawn coolness, sleepy starry sky with your own eyes... It is even better and more pleasant to keep these moments both in the memory, and in camera memory.
Of course, it is much better to look at jewellery on your hands, ears and neck, but, due to developing society and technology, such things can be seen from phones and computer screens more often.
It seems that manufacturers have made their task much easier: the product is photographed, put in an electronic catalogue, ready. But! That "but" is big enough... After all, the stage of photography is the most difficult and time-consuming. Here's why.
Jewellery is the most difficult product of virtual sale in terms of visualization. Most of these products are polished to a mirror finish. Taking pictures of such objects is a real disaster, true face of such jewellery without retouching rare makes a buyer purchase it.
If we take me as an example, then as soon as the process of jewellery production ends and the moment of photographing comes, I begin to pit wits against it. Sometimes the production is not as "annoying" as the photo process. You see that you have made a good piece of jewellery in reality, full of hope that people will appreciate it... But, looking through the resulting photos, you wonder: "What is it? Why is it black, not glossy? Where is a beautiful product, that is in reality?»
Having faced this situation, you put a professional camera aside, take your phone, take a couple of photos, apply a few filters, ready... at least something…
Some time ago I interviewed a photographer, a teacher, a manager and one of the founders of the "Light Catchers" company, engaged in professional photography, including jewellery. I would like to quote an opinion of a professional about shooting jewels:
- It does not matter what you shoot, the purpose of advertising photography is to please the buyer, not to forget about showing goods properties accurately. The purpose of jewels photography is the same — to show the product at its best to make people want it. Such a photo should shine, play, shimmer, as if it is not on a screen, but in customer`s hands, in window light of a real store. But to achieve this is not easy, because in life we look at a live product, not static, we twist it, rotate, this process is more from the category of a video than photo. A photographer needs to convey brilliance and radiance of stones and metal in a static photo. The second factor against the photographer is that most products should be on a white background! It is easier to make a product shine on black, as black colour, by virtue of our perception, emphasizes the product, makes it more bright. White background makes a product darker, it has to be lightened, and together with clarification, contrast, saturation you vanish shine away. In general, making an object shine in static pictures is the main task (and part of the problem) for a jewellery photographer.
With this task, be that as it may, photographers and retouchers have learned to cope. If they did not do that, it is unlikely that jewellery items from online catalogues could become desirable. They become, not all of them, but most of them do.
"Photo is not about a photographed thing. It is about how the photographed thing looks", Garry Winogrand. I would like to wish everyone, involved in photography and jewellery manufacturing, suffer less from jewellery photos, and all photographed things please the eye of a seller and a buyer.