U.K. based wedding photographer Paul Keppel has a very simple and easy way to get pretty amazing wedding ring shots each time with very little effort and with a relatively inexpensive gear – here is how he does that.
Keppel’s concept here is really simple but pretty ingenious – he uses an inexpensive LED light – the Yongnuo YN-160 II (under $60 at Amazon) and uses the barn doors in a way that will create a sort of a “light tent” on 3 sides of the rings. He than uses a macro lens (in his case a 180mm Tamron, but other macro lenses should work as well) to shoot the rings place one on top of the other. That is it!
The important thing here is the surface that you are shooting on. Reflective surfaces are cool – if you can buy a few inexpensive ones in black and maybe silver or white in a local crafts store or online and take them with you. Do some experiments before so you will know what do expect each time. Besides that actually arranging the rings is important – here again try and prepare in a advance a few ways that looks good so everything will run smoothly on location. At the end of the day after you get the hang of it you can do this super quickly and than when you had enough of this setup try adding more texture (like some of the examples Keppel shows in the video) and maybe other materials and items to your image and just play around – but first you need to know how to shoot with the basic set-up perfectly every time and quickly.
We have looked at product photography in the past many times including a another video on working with an inexpensive lighting setup for shooting a wedding ring, shooting jewellery photography for catalogs and and look at shooting a Rolex Timepiece.
Via: Fstoppers.