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Over the past three years or so I’ve seen a number of wedding photographers express frustration over their ring shots. Case in point, SloPhoto’s post yesterday. Joe, I hope you don’t mind me using your post and image for reference purposes.
https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1337614
Ring shots aren’t hard, they’re just different. I thought I’d take a stab at offering a bit of information in case you find it useful.
1) Unless matte or Florentine finish, a ring is polished metal and polished metal is a mirror. Don’t let it reflect anything you don’t want it to. Surround the front half of the rings (or as much as you can) with white, per the crude illustration below. It can be a white reflector, foam core board, a sheet, diffusion fabric, 11x17 copier paper, whatever.
2) If you’re setting the rings on a surface, consider using a 12x12 piece of black acrylic or any material you don’t mind being reflected off the rings. SloPhoto’s image is primarily hurting because most of the man’s band is nicely reflecting the honeycomb surface it’s resting on – not to mention Joe himself.
3) Regarding that, if you don’t want to be featured prominently in your ring shot, assume an oblique position relative to any broad metallic surfaces. In this example, (it appears) SloPhoto is almost completely perpendicular with the groom’s ring’s best reflecting surface, thus he is now immortalized in their album.
4) Use a quality macro lens in the 100 to 150mm range. This sort of thing is what they were made for. Taking ring shots with anything else is like wearing someone else’s prescription eye glasses.
5) Use a tripod or a super fast shutter speed (three or four times your focal length).
6) Jewelry develops a road film (and often light abrasions on the metal) within a day or two of normal wear, primarily due to cosmetics, hand lotion and washing hands/bathing. Suggest to your bride she have her rings professionally polished, cleaned and steamed the day before (polishing removes metal so this shouldn’t be overdone… show off your knowledge and remind her of that).
All the better if you’re willing to take 20 minutes or so and do the rings shots with her coming straight from her jeweler rather than day of.
7) Pinpoint LED’s or halogens can create dazzle if that’s the look your after. Otherwise, any sufficiently bright light source will generally work, it just may not highlight the diamond’s scintillation.
8) It’s all the rage to go wide open and shoot from inches away narrowing the depth of field to a few millimeters. I recommend you don’t do that. Just don’t. That’s an exercise in showing off gear rather than capturing the beauty of their rings. The entire ring (save perhaps the bottom of the shank if rings are laid flat) should be in focus. In SloPhoto’s example, I may be mistaken but it looks like there’s been artificial blur added. Some elements in the same plane are in focus, some are not. It is curious but I’m not certain what’s going on.
9) Diamonds are designed and cut to be at their best when viewed from the top. If you choose to shoot the center stone from the side, that’s fine, but you’re losing most of the diamond’s scintillation.
10) The diamond "substitute" Cubic Zirconia (CZ) begins gorgeous but they leak light badly. In SloPhoto’s example, the dark triangle you see in the center stone is reminiscent of the dead spot often seen in CZ’s (or poorly cut diamonds) at that angle. His couple’s stone is indeed a diamond, but it’s worth being aware of how CZ’s behave with light and to avoid angles that present that dead window (that lacks the “sparkle” the rest of the stone has) in the stone because…
11) Yep, with or without the bride’s knowledge, lots of engagement rings have CZ centers, not diamonds. Side note that CZ’s are relatively soft so they also abrade quickly resulting in a dull, less crisp look.
12) Certain shapes – notably average to poorly cut marquise and pear shapes have a dead area in the center of the stone known as a bow tie. You can recognize it because it looks like a bow tie
There’s nothing you can really do about that unless you want to Photoshop in some jazz later.
13) If you do all the above, your images may well resolve the junk in poor quality diamonds – particularly in emerald and Asscher cuts. If 1) your depth of field gathers all in focus, 2) the surrounding metal looks great, 3) you’re shooting the center stone pretty much from its top view – and the diamond still looks dull or lifeless, it probably is lesser quality and other than Photoshopping a nicer stone in its place, there’s not much you can do.
Hope this helps,
Chuck
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