Dianne King Jewellery

I was recently contacted by Fife based jeweller Dianne King.  Dianne creates one-off pieces of jewellery, often sculptural in form, and largely works with silver and gold along with semi-precious and precious stones.
The photography brief was just to treat each piece sympathetically and show it to it's best, as well as capture some close-up details.
Here are a handful of images that I created for Dianne.

  www.dianneking.com

Exploded View

I took this old lens apart because I'm in the process of making a focussing spot light that I can attach to a studio flash for still-life photography.  While it was apart I thought I'd try an "exploded" view shot, a lot of fun to do and something that I will be doing more of (and upping the complexity of).  People that have complained about how small the screws in an iPhone are should experience the metallic specks of dust that serve as grub screws in a lens like this.

Plain White Backgrounds

A small selection of work from several recent shoots.  As you can see I have been asked to do a lot of images with plain truly white backgrounds.  It doesn't allow for much exercising of any creative photography muscle but does look good for on-line product display and catalogues.

Naomi Howarth Illustartions 

Megan Ferguson-Smyth Design

St. Judes Fabrics

Photography of Art: the process

The photography of art (art reproduction photography) is all about capturing an honest image.  Whereas most photography that is designed for consumption (marketing, advertising etc) just needs an aesthetically pleasing or effective image, art reproduction needs an accurate image.  I will lay out here the various aspects of capturing an image that need to be considered when photographing artwork.  This short guide largely assumes we are talking about a painting or similar where the subject is relatively two-dimensional and flat.  Art sculptures, installations etc are a completely different animal..... Continue reading

Choices, Choices..

I recently took the following image and when it came to the editing stage I was having a play around in Adobe Camera Raw (processing software).  I found several equally valid but completely (completely might be an exaggeration) different ways to edit the image, all of which I liked.  I finally settled on some changes and then did all the usual cleaning up of the image in Photoshop; the final image can be seen immediately below.

I have also included this image to show some possible alternative ways that the final image could have been edited.   It just goes to show, there isn't always a single correct or obvious way to edit in post. Also, you may notice there isn't always just one correct white balance setting.

I'll be posting an article about art reproduction photography in a couple of days where, conversely, I'll talk about photographing subjects where there certainly is only one correct white balance value and editing solution.

www.wvephotography.com