As young girls we all go through our parents and grandparents jewelry trying it on, seeing how pretty we look with pearls and stone falling from our tiny necks and wrists, and I can't deny being any different. After waiting many years there came the time when these beautiful pieces became both mine and my sisters, hopefully to pass on one day to our little girls. One can see by this point that this project has turned into more than just taking photographs of objects to finish the class, and at first I was unsure of what to use for this project, but after going through three or four ideas this seemed to fit perfectly. To me, this was a challenging project mostly because metal tends to create specular highlights, and plenty of them. The goal was to show texture while keeping highlights to a minimal, with some pieces being more successful than others, but that was to be expected. This project though challenging and frustrating has given me the opportunity to learn and adapt my techniques to best fit the situation as well as give me the chance to take a walk down memory lane, if only for a short while.
| |
Since I shot photographs using two different methods naturally there would be two different set-ups, one of which was fairly simple while the other took a bit of trial and error to get right. The two photographs above are of these set-ups, the one on the left was much lighting to accomplish because there were four already there, it was only a matter of diffusion (a.k.a. a piece of computer paper) to get the lighting just right. For these photographs I had to attach bellows to my camera along with a 38 mm thimble lens and placed my subjects on a piece of glass raised off a white background to achieve my full view shots as well as some close up work. The set up on the right, at first, seemed to be more simple yet in the end became much more intricate than expected. The camera used for the majority of my close up shots was a stereo microscope, on top of having its own light source there was a need for external fiber optics. This began to cause extreme amounts of flair, a problem I was never fully able to solve. Using computer paper once again became my neat little trick to bouncing light so the external source never directly lit the subject, and after many small changes in the angle of light I was able to achieve proper enough lighting.
Click on the following photographs to view magnified images whose magnification ranges 3x - 8x. Also click on "family jewels" at the top of each screen to return to the home page.
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
Contact Me, Brittany Miller.