Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
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56 ORNAMENT 38.1.2015 Experiments with Lighting Sources A s a photographer, I constantly think of how I can improve my photography or how to better utilize my equipment. While waiting for my new book, The Photography of Personal Adornment (Liu 2014), to land in California, I realized that I had not used some of my older equipment for a long time, perhaps not since I switched from shooting primarily film to digital. Knowing that this year I have to travel to photograph out of the studio, I wanted to know what was the minimum of equipment I needed to carry, yet be capable of taking macro images that were of good reproduction quality. I set up an arrangement of ethnographic and ancient bracelets on the frosted Plex of my decades old Swiss FOBA sweep table. I chose light and dark surfaces, as well as varying surface textures, some of which I knew were very difficult to photograph. Hand-holding the same Canon 7D single-lens reflex body and 60mm macro lens, I only varied the sources of the lighting, using as baseline my Chimera ETHNOGRAPHIC AND ANCIENT BRACELETS arranged on the frosted Plex of a FOBA sweep table, illuminated from above with a small Chimera softbox, set at 800 watt second power from a Norman P2000D power supply. The Canon 7D was set at ISO 100, lens at f32 and hand-held. The African, Asian and Native American bracelets of stone, shell, boar's tusks, metal and glass are 6.3 to 10.7 centimeters diameters. Note that shadows are softer with the Chimera softbox compared to those on flash-mounted diffusers. Photoshop was used to resize the images to 320 dpi, sharpened and auto color corrected. Photographs by Robert K. Liu/Ornament. jewelry photography Robert K. Liu softbox (82 x 60 centimeters), set on 800 watt second power from my Norman P2000D. Usually leaving on the modeling light of the softbox so I could see to focus, I then used a Canon 540 EZ or a 580EX external flash, equipped with either a Lumiquest Promax Softbox, Promax Pocket Bouncer or a slipon translucent plastic diffuser. When shooting with external flash, I varied the f-stops from 32, 22, 16 to 11. I also tried shooting with no other light than the modeling lamp, with the camera set to ISO 100, 800, 3200 and 6400, using either P, CA or M modes and varying the f-stop from f2.8 to 16. None of these modes of lighting produced acceptable images, being either too dark or having too shallow a depth-of-field (DOF). With more trials and effort, high ISO and closed down lens settings should work, although a tripod would most likely help. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that external flashes, with any of the above diffusers, could produce acceptable images, although the Chimera softbox was