Dotted Tusk Jewelry (Part 1)

Today I met with Caroline from Dotted Tusk to take some product shots of her jewelry as well as some shots of her while actually making the jewelry. In the next weeks there will be at least one more shooting coming up complementing the product shots with some shots of people wearing the jewelry.

Dotted Tusk is the brain child of Caroline who has been working on it for the last 2 years. When I met her the first time and we talked about her passion of making her own jewelry I was deeply impressed and this is how we came together to shoot. Meet Caroline:

After graduating from The University of Alabama in 2011, Caroline decided to set her finance degree aside to take a chance on her real passions for jewelry and travel. From that idea and her own start up funds, Dotted Tusk was founded out of a spare bedroom of her parent’s Baton Rouge, LA home. Since then Caroline has spent time in India working with manufacturers, moved from Baton Rouge to Atlanta and continues to put her entrepreneur spirit to use to work hard to grow her brand. She launched her first full line Fall 2012, where she was able to design and manufacturer all the jewelry herself.

Caroline has always felt a strong passion for jewelry because of her belief that every piece can tell a story. Whether it’s something very valuable that was passed down from older generations, a necklace from a first love, or just a birthday gift from a best friend, each piece of jewelry can hold sentimental value that makes it special. Each piece that Caroline designs has a special story to her and she hopes that it will do the same for you!

It was clear from the start that the pictures should portray the jewelry and Caroline in a very natural way, depict her in her workshop where she is actually doing the work. For the product shots we opted for a simple setup keeping the later integration into the webpage as well as post-processing in mind.

Basic setup for product shots.

Camera: Sony NEX 6
Exposure: f/8-11, 1/160, ISO 100
Lens: Sony 50mm f/1.8
Flash 1: Alien Bees B800 through 30 in. x 60 in. softbox
Triggered by cyberSync

The initial light setup for the products looked like this. The softbox was almost straight und I shot almost on axis.

For those shots depicting how the jewelry is made I opted for the OM-D with a 40mm equivalent. The reason for this was limited space; it would not have been possible to shoot with the 75mm equivalent of the Sony.

Setup for work place shots.

Camera: Olympus OM-D
Exposure: f/8.0, 1/250, ISO 200
Lens: Panasonic Lumix 20mm f/1.7
Flash 1: Alien Bees B800 through umbrella camera right over model
Flash 2: Alien Bees B800 bare camera left
Lighting ratio: roughly 2:1 (accounting for umbrella)
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The initial light setup for those shots was the following – the first picture from above is taken with this setup.

For now, I will only give you a sneak peek – more to follow soon, once we are done with the other shooting. The necklaces were shot on a white mannequin against black backdrop.