Diamonds and coal
Shot in a light tent with white led lighting and a combination of florescent and tungsten.
They are little gits to manage to balance on the coal and I never realised how much dust coal generates by just being there!
Converted from RAW, adjusted the brightness slightly as was a bit dark, cropped to removed extra stones and mirror, removed a couple of dust spots from the mirror, resized and sharpened.
After Challenge..
30th isnt too bad I dont think, least im heading upwards! Thanks for all the comments they are always appreciated.
I have been wanting to shoot diamonds for a while now and this was the perfect excuse to go and distupt my dads workshop for the day & rummage in al his shiney gems and take photos of them & also the diamond photos for the challenge.
Didnt realise gems were this difficult to shoot and I still need to practice more with shots on mirrors as the background colour never come out the way I want it to.
Statistics
Place: 30 out of 102 Avg (all users): 5.7610 Avg (commenters): 6.1111 Avg (participants): 5.5909 Avg (non-participants): 5.8261 Views since voting: 964 Views during voting: 314 Votes: 159 Comments: 11 Favorites: 0
I love the concept, but I'm not sure the focus and lighting work for me. I can't put my finger on exactly why, but the extremely shallow DoF might be the culprit. I really love the OoF diamonds in the lower left though! They just look cool!
The contrast of the black coal against the shiny sparkly diamonds is great. There are a couple of things that bother me a little, the grey background is a little, well, grey! Maybe a crisp white background may have worked a little better.
The oof diamonds at the bottom left draw my eye a bit, though I am not a big fan of foreground bokeh, personally I'd have probably left them out of the shot. I do really like the angle they are at though so maybe just a larger dof (though I guess you used the macro tube) to keep them sharper and maybe not cutting any of the diamond off.
An ok composition but maybe slightly tight crop. The two 'diamonds' on the left facing same direction should not have been there as it just makes it look messy.
Hi Janna! I think this is an excellent shot for the challenge. Nicely thought out, well laid out, good use of the elements, and a great title for the shot as well. I like the out of focus diamonds in the foreground, but there are some voters that don't like anything blurred - can't please 'em all. The only techical nits I can find are the sections of too-bright reflection on the three prominent diamonds, particularly the top one. You'll have to ask after the challenge, but I think in advanced you could have cloned a bit to reduce that blown out section. It's terribly hard to avoid bright spots on diamonds because of the facets - at least one is going to be facing a light source in some way - that's what makes them sparkle, after all. The only other thing I can think of is maybe making the background a less dullish color. Blue or white would be good. All in all, I think you did a great job with this!
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