A self-imposed homework assignment turned tutorial....

The Caveat:
Okay, I guess I should start by saying I'm by no means a pro at either photography or post-processing.  I am an avid lurker at dGrin, a burgeoning Strobist, and a amateur blogger / blog follower (check out Rita's page, one of my faves!).

The Background:
My sister Dana recently started designing her own jewelry.  She's been using her facebook and blog sites to show off her wares.

I've been trading emails back and forth with her over the past month or two about photography tips and what not, and wanted to provide some feedback/pointers on some of her photos.  As I thought about it, I figured it'd be just as easy to try my own hand at it and incorporate some of the things I was thinking about into a tutorial of sorts.  So that's what this is; a means break out the photo gear and try to pass a little something on.  For a little extra background, a some of the things I've been covering with Dana lately have focused on lighting, depth of field, and the Rule of Thirds.  As I was walking through this session, I tried to focus a little on each of those.

The Set-up:
So to begin, I raided my wife's jewelry case looking for the right subject matter.  I settled on a big silver flower necklace.  For a backdrop, I grabbed our trusty cutting board out of our kitchen.  Our cutting board is pretty light colored, as it is normally.  I knew I wanted the background to be kind of dark to contrast with the silver of the necklace, so I wet the cutting board down ahead of the shoot and let some of the water soak into the wood to give it a little more natural darkness.  I also knew I wanted to try out variable levels of diffused natural lighting, so I stayed in the kitchen and set up right in front of the single kitchen window.

Angle #1:

One of the things I was telling Dana recently was about depth of field (DOF).  I recently bought a nice 50mm lens that opens all the way up to f1.4, which is really bright.  I love shooting in Aperture Mode, where I set the aperture that I want and let the camera do the calculations for the correct shutter speed.  With this 50mm lens, I love shooting wide open because the depth of field is so limited that it can really draw out your subject by blurring the background.  In this first shot, I wanted to point out how DOF can hurt an image.  The DOF is so thin that the primary subject, shot at an angle, falls out of the field of focus.  

I think this was shot handheld, which is another problem when shooting wide open.  With such limited DOF at f-1.4,  even your body's natural movement and normal handshake can throw that limited DOF out of whack.  I grabbed the tripod after this first shot, just to eliminate that one variable from the exposures.

So I gradually cranked up the aperture a stop at a time until I ended up with a DOF that was pretty close to encompassing the majority of the flowers.  You can also see the chain is a lot more recognizable in this one for what it is.  Another interesting tidbit; I need to do some reading to confirm that I'm remembering this part correctly.  As you increase the f-stop, I believe the DOF increases more to the rear of the focal plane than to the front.  In other words, look at the image below; the focal plane is at the center of the big turquoise flower.  It took almost 5 f-stops to get the rear flowers in focus.  While it's hard to tell here, I don't think the focal plane on the front side increased to the same measure (you really have to blow the image up to see that the bottom-most flower is slightly out of focus).

In this shot, I also changed the lighting up, closing the blinds completely.  They're white, so there's still plenty of light bleeding through for the exposure, but you can see how it's a lot more diffused and less contrasty (compare the shadows underneath the flowers).  Not a bad shot to work with, but I liked the slightly more contrasty version, which I used for the final tweaking.

You can see the wood was drying quickly, just in the time it took me to go upstairs and grab / set-up the tripod.

To complete the shot, I added some vignetting around the corners which helps draw the subject out even more by further darkening the wood fore/background.

The Final Image -- All in all, pretty happy with the way this one turned out, with two minor exceptions.  The first is the dark bur in the wood that falls right in the middle of the chain, just above the flowers.  If I'd noticed it during the shot, I might have tried to cover that bur with the flowers; or at a minimum, offset it so that it doesn't fall right in the middle like it does, slightly drawing the eye away from the necklace.  The second minor quirk is the angle that the grain of the wood is running.  It's aiming just slightly to the left a little more than I would prefer, but that makes for a good segue into the next part of the lesson where I address that particular issue.  There's also the issue of the cross-grain cut marks from this being a functional cutting board, but that's more a reflection of the choice in props, and not so much in anything that's easily controllable in the process of shooting/processing.


Angle #2:

 In this next set up, I changed the angle a little, zooming in on the flowers, intentionally cropping out part of the chain.  Again, DOF in the initial shot (wide open) was too limited.

So, I dialed up the f-stop.  I think the "sweet spot," exposure-wise ended up being f-5.6 on most of the "final" images.  All things considered, that's good for the average photographer intending to shoot this type of image  Lenses that shoot at f-5.6 (most kit lenses) will easily get to 5.6.  

So as I mentioned in Part 1, I was a little concerned with the final image because of the angle of the wood grain.  As you can see in the screen grab below (you might have to view the full-size image in order to really see it), I'm rotating the final image slightly so that the grain falls more in line with the vertical alignment.  Note, as I'm doing the rotating, I'm cropping a fraction of the right, uppermost flower.  Not a major issue, just something to think about as you're cropping--don't want to cut out too much of the main subject.

I also talked about how I'd been teaching Dana about the Rule of Thirds.  It might be hard to see in the preview, but in the full-size blow up, you can see the horizontal/vertical guidelines that break up the image into equal thirds.  Note how I've made sure that the center of the turquoise flower falls on the lower horizontal line.  The Rule of Thirds basically states that, aesthetically speaking, the center of an image is its weakest point.  As with any rule, there are exceptions, but as a general rule it applies to probably most of the images we see in our daily lives.  Next time you're watching TV, try to find scenes where the focal point (an actor, etc.) is positioned dead center of your TV screen; not very often, I'd bet.

So here's the final of the close-up.  Again, added some slight vignetting (more of a square-shaped vignette this time around). 

The Final Image -- Again, pretty pleased with this one.  There are the minor exceptions....the bur in the wood, the knife marks.  the grain still isn't 100% vertical.  I'll throw it up on dGrin and see what the critics say.