Jewellery photography is a discipline that asks everything of your equipment and your patience, and forgives nothing. A watch face at 1:1 magnification. A diamond ring on a white surface. A gold necklace on velvet. These are the scenes that take three hours to light and three minutes to shoot, and they look effortless when they’re done correctly.
We photographed the Raikar Jewellers collection over a full day in Goa — rings, earrings, necklaces, pendants. The brief was straightforward: make every piece look the way it looks in the jeweller’s hands when they’re describing it to a customer. The warmth of the gold. The depth of the stones. The quality of the setting.
The technical setup: we use a macro lens — 100mm at 1:1 — on a focusing rail. Every millimetre of depth-of-field is deliberate. For a ring, the focal plane runs across the face of the stone. For a necklace laid flat, we stop down to f/11 or f/16 to get the full pendant in focus while keeping the background soft. We shoot tethered to a large monitor so the client can see the image as we capture it and flag any piece that needs repositioning.
Light for jewellery comes from two directions: a large soft main source from above, and a second, harder source at a specific angle to catch the sparkle in the stones. The sparkle is not an accident. It’s engineered. You position the light at the exact angle where the stone’s facets reflect back toward the lens, and then you don’t move anything — not the light, not the jewellery, not the camera — until the exposure is complete.
The colour accuracy for gold jewellery is critical. Yellow gold should look yellow gold, not orange-gold or green-gold. We calibrate our colour under controlled lighting conditions and verify on a colour-calibrated monitor before final delivery. The final images are reviewed by the jeweller before we call the shoot complete.
If you have a jewellery brand or individual pieces that need to be photographed for retail, e-commerce, or editorial, reach out to us.
Further reading: jewellery photography.
