Over the years, I have photographed many people and things for various jobs.
At one point, early on in my photography career, I was freelancing for a marketing firm.
The firm would provide me with awesome and challenging photography jobs to do. One of which was photographing a lot of jewelry for a local store.
Being how early I was in my career, I did not know enough about product photography to charge a lot. So the store got what they paid for. Inexperience. I did my best, though, and they used some of the photographs in various advertisements as planned.
In the end, it worked out well.
However, I made a mistake. One very serious mistake, which I learned from shortly after.
Click on the photo to view it larger. Do you notice anything odd?
Give it a good look.
Do you notice where the camera was focusing?
If you can’t tell, I’ll help. Â It’s focusing just on the right of the center diamonds of the earrings.
Here is what happened…
I was using a macro lens. The Nikon 105mm Macro, to be precise. The lens has a max aperture of f/2.8, which is quite shallow. That means at f/2.8 everything behind or in front of the focal point will be extremely soft.
This photograph was made at f/5, which as it turned out was also quite shallow with the lens.
My lessons learned:
- When doing product photography, use a smaller aperture, somewhere between f/11 and f/22.
- Macro lenses enhance aperture effect, so a large aperture is a shallow aperture.
- Don’t assume you know your lens. Test it thoroughly before a job.
I learned lessons from my mistake. Fortunately, the customer was happy. And I’ve never made the mistake since.
Don’t make the same mistake I did. Hopefully, by reading this, you’ll avoid it.
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