'Studio' lighting

Lara is exploring the option of setting up a designer jewellery business.

I have been roped in (enthusiastically) as the photographer, and have discovered that photographing jewellery well is extremely difficult! But, after a week or so of experimentation, I think we've got there -perfect white, shadowless backgrounds!

This is the third 'light box' I've made, and unlike the first two, it seems to work. I could have bought this setup for £180 or so, but instead, some nice people at Freecycle Olney provided the desk lamps, combined with a bit of white paint in an old cardboard box, supported by a spatula taped to a potato masher...

Some may call it 'bodging'. We prefer the term 'resourceful'.

For those of you who might be interested, the trick appears to be getting enough distance between the product (i.e. the earrings) and the background. This is so you can place the lights which light the background behind the product. I found you need the background to be something like 3-4 stops overexposed in order to wash it out completely. So, you need to have another light (less bright) lighting the product, so that this is correctly exposed.

The other very important thing is to get your white balance correct - otherwise you get a beautiful grey or salmon colour... Lots of people, it seem, use daylight bulbs, but there doesn't appear to be that need for that expense anymore if your camera can handle manually set white balances.