Photography is one of the most critical and important aspects of a successful online gemstone store. Images must be exact replicas of the original gemstones in every way to avoid misleading consumers who could potentially be your next big online sale.
Mastering the art of gemstone photography is a very time consuming and frustrating practice. There are literally hundreds of blogs and websites offering advice on this topic and even with the best equipment and photographic skills, very few people can actually do it well.
At Touchstone Gems we are no exception and have opted for the less is more approach, which for now, seems to be yielding decent results. We have to date spent three months photographing and cataloging over 600 loose precious and semi precious gemstones, with another 400 to go before we can launch our online shop.
Our loose gemstones have been photographed using a Nikon D90 with a 105mm F2.8 macro lens. Lighting is probably the most important consideration and getting the correct white balance setting is vital to produce accurate colour representations for an array of different coloured gemstones.
Because the subject matter is so small, a stable tripod is vital to prevent any 'movement'. Photographs do require some post production and cropping to produce a reasonable size image with the gemstone perfectly centered.
Some gemstone photographers prefer to shoot with a black background. We used a simple white infinity background made with normal A4 copy paper and our very small calibrated stones (which are normally bought in lots of 100's or 1000's) were photographed with other identical gemstones in the background.
Your comments would be great as Touchstone Gems 'charts' into some unknown photography and e-commerce territories.
To view more gemstone photography or to submit your work, go to http://www.directorygemstones.org which is a free photo sharing website that promotes the exchange of knowledge and images between other like-minded people in the industry.
Helen Squirrell for Touchstone Gems cc
Johannesburg, South Africa
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