My wife is much into handcrafting all kind of useful and pretty things – she is painting, modelling, creating jewellery, knitting… to name few. Besides being a very skilled graphic designer and a great cook. Last night she finally opened her own blog (after being busy before with my pages and Christmas gifts for the complete family), about all the nice items she creates. You can see it here. Photography courtesy of me… here is how the last photoshoot was made.
The studio was our bedroom, the top of our drawer to be more precise, which features a plate of greyish glass on top. That makes a nice surface for detail shots of handmade jewellery. The setup was build of my two strobes, shown beside. Sorry for the slight disorder around…
The Metz 48 AF1 flash was equipped with the Yong-Nuo RF-602 receiver and a self-made gridspot made of black straws and cardboard. It was set on a tripod to camera right pointing down on the “models”. The flash was set to 1/32 strenght if I’m not wrong.
The second strobe (Exacta DPZ 38AF-P) was set to 1/16 strength (the lowest setting) on camera left. It had a 1/2 1/4 CTB (Color temperature blue) gel and a neutral density gel stuck to it (to additionally reduce it’s power on these close distances). I pointed it at a sheet of white foam behind the pieces. That gave a nice coolish shine on the surface from behind, while the Metz gave texture to the jewellery. On the left is a photo of the setup in the same exposure as the final images.
Something I noticed watching the final images on the screen was that the wooden surface of the chest is visible through the glass, including some spots. Next time I will put a black paper below the glass, to have an even surface.
The exposure of the camera (which was attached to a tripod) was set to a) eleminate the ambient light and b) give a closed aperture for enough deepth of field on the relatively close 50-200mm lens, used at 200mm most of the time.
Here is one of the results, a pair of “recycled” and prettified earrings. The photo at the top of this post shows a small bracelet made of wooden pearls and with a flexible band. I am pretty pleased with the result, given the easy and fast setup!
