It’s been a joy to partner with ParkFord Jewelry on their product photography over the past couple of years.
The instantly recognizable designs & excellent craftsmanship have earned multiple features in publications. See the most recent feature in Instore Magazine below, as well as a preview of ParkFord’s stunning website. We love seeing our images deployed in such beautiful layouts.
Here are some highlights from the photography that we did for Stephen Avery in 2023.
Avery has been cutting gems for decades–innovating the art form & earning awards all along the way–and he continues to wow the jewelry industry with his combinations of materials, colors, and shapes.
It’s been a real honor to get to collaborate for several years, including cataloging some of his personal inventory as well as gem material that dates back decades to unique or now-exhausted sources.
Tiffany-style photography is a category of jewelry photography that is characterized by factors such as:
Here’s a recent product shoot that we did for San Diego-based brand: THATCH.
The photography we did for them is a great example of something that’s easy to overlook when hiring a professional jewelry photographer: consistency. Do you see how every photo is the exact same shade & brightness of gold? The necklaces all reach the same point within the frame? The style of reflection is carried throughout the batch of images?
We’re fanatical about maintaining internal reference documents for every single client, so that every time we work together we’re able to deliver the exact same standards that we did before.
In a world dominated by ecommerce, having beautiful photos is a must. But having consistently beautiful photos is what gives your customers a professional & meaningful experience on your store.
It’s always a pleasure photographing loose gemstones. Rather than focusing on showing all the design details of a piece of jewelry, the entire image is geared towards getting the highest performance and color accuracy out of the gem. Often compositing multiple images to get a level of brilliance the reflects what you’d see in hand, gem photography is truly an artform.
This summer we worked with Derco Fine Jewelers in San Francisco to create a new set of creative images for the home page of their website. With their reference image and our intimate understanding of how to properly style and light diamond jewelry, we were able to deliver a diverse but cohesive set of images, pre-sized for their web header images on both desktop and mobile.
This list is not meant to be exhaustive, and hopefully it will inspire some of your own ideas for objects that will be perfect for your project.
And remember, your images don’t need to be filled with elaborate props & backdrops to be impactful. Some of the most beautiful photos are artfully arranged pieces of jewelry in a simple scene. Props & backdrops should play a supporting role in your photos, and appear only to help tell the story of your brand or collection.
Is there a story that you want to tell with this set of images? It may relate to your company itself, or it may be specific to the collection that you’re launching. You can also think of the story as the “scene” of the image, or the theme. It could be a beach picnic, or a working woman’s desk, or a secret garden.
Although it can be a helpful jumping off point, your images certainly don’t need to have a complete story. Sometimes just a vibe or a particular aesthetic is enough to communicate.
What are the words that you associate with your brand, your designs, or this specific collection? You likely already have some in mind, but here are some ideas:
Do you like full, voluminous images, or do you prefer a simpler composition where the jewelry & lighting do the heavy lifting?
There’s no right or wrong answer. I tend to look at fuller compositions as more of a story-telling image, where you’re trying to express a mood more than document every detail of the jewelry. On the other hand, simpler compositions tend to have fewer props & other objects in the image, so the jewelry really is the sole focus.
Needless to say, we can do a combination of these styles that will be cohesive & suitable for different purposes.
In this case, tone is referring to whether you prefer light, medium, or dark images. This impacts things like which backdrops we choose & how we use our studio lighting.
For large sets of images, it’s good to have a plan for how color will be used. Color shows up in a few ways: the backdrop material, the props, and occasionally the light itself.
A good rule of thumb is to select 2-3 background colors (if you’re unsure, go with a neutral like white, grey, taupe, or black) & 3-5 accent colors that can be used in props and other materials that show up in the images. This is also an opportunity to mix in your brand colors, if desired.
And don’t forget, monochromatic images make a big impression too! You don’t need to use a lot of color in your images to make them impactful.
I consider the quality of light to be on a spectrum from very soft, diffused light, to very harsh, defined light (and shadows).
Soft & diffused light is a neutral, flattering lighting style for jewelry & products. The shadows are natural & subtle. The viewer’s attention is focused on the objects in the image.
Harsh & defined light is dramatic. It casts long & dark shadows, and creates hot highlights on the objects in the image. This lighting style is associated with a more modern, bold, or edgy look.
There are three main viewing angles used in editorial photography:
Be sure to check out my blog post about materials that work great as props & backdrops in jewelry photo shoots.
Please use this page as a visual guide to select the angles you’d like your jewelry photographed at. It helps us communicate clearly about the type of photos you want, and is used as a reference to maintain consistency in your projects over time. Don’t see the angle you want? No worries – send us an example and we’ll match it for you!
This stunning green/blue sapphire ring by Lauren Fine Jewelry was set with diamonds throughout the halo, gallery, and twisting down the shank of the ring. I combined the individual shots for this compilation image.
