To my surprise, I’m doing jewelry photography!

Before I got into serious photography I was a jeweler and always depended on a professional, Hap Sakwa, to photograph my nationally reputed fine art jewelry. I had very high standards, not only for my jewelry, but for the photography that represented it. Here are examples of Hap’s photography and my earlier jewelry.

~ jewelry: Ann Brooks, photos: Hap Sakwa

By last summer, and for the last five years I’d been solely a photographer. In August I was puzzling over what to do with a substantial stash of beads I still had. Maybe sell them.? To whom? Then I had a better idea. Use them to make jewelry and sell it to get a return on the beads. Beaded jewelry was a come-down after having been a fine art jeweler. For physical reasons I couldn’t do that any more, so hey, why not have fun doing beaded jewelry? And in addition to my studio at Art Works Downtown, why not sell it online?

So, I’ve been having a great time designing and making beaded jewelry. Then I had to face the challenge of how to do my own jewelry photography. Sure, I’m a photographer, have a good camera but jewelry photography is a real speciality, needing equipment, lighting conditions and experience. Research on the web brought me to these great videos by NYC photographer, Michael Seto on how to photograph jewelry. I adapted some of Michael’s ideas to my own situation, determined not to use traditional lighting, but the diffused natural light coming through the bay windows in my living room.

Teaching myself the ropes of jewelry photography has been a steep learning curve and I’m still learning. So far, I’ve learned a lot about using my Canon 40D that I didn’t know before and a some new things about using available light. Though you can see lots of my jewelry photos here on my zibbet.com shop pages, here are a few examples.