When it comes to photographic subjects, coloured gemstones would have to be without doubt the most challenging and oftentimes exasperating I’ve ever come across. Since I started my gem journey back in 2008 I have literally taken thousands and thousands of photographs of gems of every kind, in the rough and cut. I have experimented with any lightbulb I could get my hands on (and I know more about lightbulbs than any reasonably sane person should) and tried all kinds of setups and cameras. I’ve tried photographing gemstones outdoors using natural sunlight, indoors using all those lightbulbs and still today I find them very demanding and tricky.

If I was to pick my favorite setup for photographing gems it would be using filtered natural sunlight but unfortunately that comes with it’s own set of challenges. I found that I had to time it so that the sun was at a relatively low angle either in the morning or afternoon so that the sunlight would strike the surface I was using (normally a piece of smoky glass) just right. If the sun was too high all the dust specks would stand out and the overall effect just wasn’t right. I also discovered that the quality of the light differed between morning and late afternoon, one was warmer and the other cooler (I can’t remember which was which now) and this influenced the colour of the gem in the resulting photograph. Adding a bit too much warmth added a yellow tint to the gem that wasn’t there and so a blue gem might have more green (ie. blue+yellow=green) than was really in the stone.