Today’s Photo: The Blue Bracelet
At Thanksgiving I learned that one of my relatives has started making jewelry. I was asked to take a few photos and must confess that I had never thought of jewelry photography. I had zero information about the how and no special equipment. I was just armed with a knowledge of the fundamentals of photography. With the help of my wife, we found two backgrounds. One light and one dark. I set up the tripod, a desk lamp and a place to layout the jewelry. After messing with the white balance, I finally settled on one that got rid of the yellow and orange of the incandescent.
I took lots of photos and then put them into Lightroom. Almost immediately I discovered that I had erred in some of the photos. Now, how to make them work. The photos on the white turned out splendid. The black, not so much. It turns out that my camera takes photos of exactly what I told it to. Which happened to include the fabric pattern of the background cloth.
I processed the light colored background and then began trying to figure out how to salvage the dark. After much thought and trail and error, a light bulb went on (and it was not a flash). Enter Dodge and Burn. I was able to Burn the photo around the background which flattened the fabric pattern almost all the way. Tossed into the bottom here is a before and after of the Burn process.
