Lighting Vintage Jewellery Images

When selling your antique or vintage jewellery on your own website or on eBay the hardest thing to do and the most essential is to have great images. Vintage Jewellery without pictures simply does not sell  as it is a unique product a customer cannot get a good impression of the piece from a description. Dark and  grainy pictures will not get your antique locket sold and your vintage ring will get a much higher price if your customers can see the sparkle in the gems. 

Antique Brooch Image

Lighting Vintage Jewellery Images 

Great vintage jewellery photos are achieved with a combination of a good camera, a steady tripod and to my mind the most important the right lighting. With poor lighting you get dark and grainy pictures and no amount of effort with a photo editing program is going to make your charms stand out individually from the bracelet . Silver will appear grey and that gold looks so dull it is very unattractive. 

The difference light makes to vintage jewellery is amazing. Compare these photographs of the same trio of three Miracle brooches. Both these photos have been taken with flash. The first is without a good lighting system and the second is well light. Both have the same camera left on automatic settings. 

Brooches without lighting

Well lit brooches

You can achieve excellent photographs under very bright natural sun lighting. The first of these cameo brooch pictures was taken inside , by a window on a bright sunny day. How many bright sunny days like this do we get here in the UK?  To overcome the problem of dull days I have just invested in a new lighting system for photographing my jewellery. Here are the results bright sunny day V good artificial lighting.  The second photograph of the same cameo jewellery has a lot more detail showing in the carving it was taken under a very strong daylight bulb in a light reflecting tent. 

Bright sunny daylight cameo

light box cameo

Please note the brightness of these antique jewellery images has not been adjusted in a photo editing program. The clarity and brightness is as the images came from the camera.  Hopefully from now on I will be able to get bright and clear jewellery images no matter when I take them.