Last week, I have just taken some product shots for an Toronto online jewelry seller. They are selling fashion jewelry online mostly with bling bling crystals, and they put new products on shelf each week. Attached is one of the earrings I shot for them.

As most Toronto product photographers agree, jewellery is one of the most challenging shooting subjects in product photography. Shooting jewellery is not easy because first, they are all made of reflective material; second, they are all too tiny.

Reflective material such as metal and gemstones easily absorb the surrounding objects into the image under lighting. So after shooting, it requires a lot of time to remove those reflections with image post production. Among all different jewelry types, shooting gemstone or diamond or crystal is even more difficult, because there are too many reflective facets on one diamond.

On the other hand, jewellery is usually very small, which makes hard for a product photographer to set up the lightings according.

In most cases, it takes much more time to touch up the jewelry pictures afterwards than to actually shoot them. Sometimes I wonder: for jewelry photography, what is more important, shooting or retouching?