Perhaps you need to shoot a watch for an online auction. Or photograph your wedding ring for insurance purposes. Or get an image of an antique coin. In any of these cases, you're going to need to take pictures of something that's small, shiny, and hard to photograph. Often people resort to professionals to capture these reflective objects, but there's no reason why you can't do it yourself using your digital camera. With the use of a light tent and a few photographic techniques, you can get quality images of your shiny stuff.

In this article, we'll show you how to get great results when photographing small, shiny objects like jewelry by building your own light tent. First, we'll show you different approaches for building different types of light tents, using materials that you can probably find around your house. Next, we'll discuss how to light your object to bring out its natural sparkle while avoiding reflections. Finally, we'll set up our camera and take some steps to maximize image clarity and get the best picture possible.

Know your Goals
One of the most important aspects of any photography project is to understand the goal of the shoot. When photographing reflective, diminutive objects, you need to analyze each piece and determine which attributes you want to capture. Knowing whether you want to showcase the bright highlights of a diamond or the smooth texture of an antique silver pin will allow you to make intelligent decisions on light placement, background color and texture, and camera angle. In this article, we'll make a few setups that you can use for many different types of objects, but keep in mind that the presentation of your objects is subjective, so take some chances and experiment with different techniques.

Take your Camera Camping
Our main goal for this article is to show you how you can make your shiny stuff look great without having to go to a professional photographer or take out a small business loan. Sure, you could just slap the object down on your desk and snap a picture, as we did for the first shot in Figure 1, but this shot is riddled with problems. There are bright highlights from the flash, mixed lighting from the fluorescent overhead lights, a distracting background, odd shadows -- overall, just a poor representation of our object. The second shot is much better.

Figure 1: The first picture suffers from many problems that a light tent and some proper setup fixed.

It won't be hard to improve this shot if we change our shooting technique. To do this, we'll build a light tent using objects that you can find around the house, or easily pick up at the local hardware store. A light tent is an enclosed area made of a translucent material that provides seamless, diffused lighting. Designs for light tents vary, but they generally fall into two categories: hard or soft. The hard designs utilize materials such as cardboard boxes, translucent plastic sheets, white foam, and more to diffuse and reflect light. The soft setups use woven materials such as tissue paper, pillowcases, or bed sheets to give you that seamless surrounding that you can easily reposition and adjust.

You can buy small light tent setups from professional camera supply companies, and they do a great job. However, these setups are often expensive and can be difficult to adjust. The biggest challenge faced when photographing objects such as jewelry is minimizing reflections, so building your own setup lets you respond best to the nuances of your object. Plus, you'll get more involved with the process and have more fun learning how to get the best shot.

In the next part of this article, we'll show you how to build several different configurations of a light tent. We're going to skip over the lighting setups and camera settings for now, but we'll get into that later in the article.

The Fast-and-Cheap Method
The first light tent setup we'll build involves nothing more than your camera, some tape, and a couple facial tissues. Set your camera up on your tripod to minimize camera movement, and then place your object on a white sheet of paper to provide a neutral background and minimize reflections. Next, position your camera over the object and tape the tissue around the lens to form a tent over the object, as shown in Figure 2. The result is an instant improvement over our first attempt, as shown in Figure 3.

This simple "soft" light tent works great for small objects as it provides a simple, seamless environment that diffuses light adequately and costs pennies to create. However, it can be tricky to adjust and the short length of regular tissues mean you'll have to get very close to the object. For digital cameras without a macro lens, this can result in blurry images.

Note: Instead of tissue, try using a pillowcase. The thicker fabric helps evenly diffuse the light and the larger size allows for bigger objects and greater adjustability.

Figure 2: With only a few facial tissues, you can build a quick light tent.

Figure 3: Diffusing the light and changing the background has improved our shot. However, a more substantial light tent can work even more magic.

A More-Flexible Setup
Once you have a light tent set up, you'll probably be able to use it for years, so why not take a little time and get it right? This next light tent uses a cardboard box to provide the structure and various materials as the diffusing agent. As shown in Figure 4, this light tent is large enough to allow for bigger objects and can be easily adjusted to meet the demands of many different shots.

Building this type of light tent involves a fair amount of improvisation, as you can use many different household objects to build it. For this setup, we first cut holes in the sides of the box, leaving enough cardboard to provide support for the rest of the box. We then covered the holes with white pillowcases secured with duct tape. For the interior of the box, we used spray adhesive to apply white pieces of paper to cover any exposed surface. This provides a seamless background and ensures that any reflections from the interior of the box are white. For the front of the box, we taped a white, plastic garbage bag and cut a slot for the camera lens to fit through. The whole process took about 20 minutes -- now we have a versatile light tent that can be used for many sessions. It also produced an acceptable image, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 4: A cardboard box, a pillowcase, and a white garbage bag are the main elements of this versatile light tent.

Figure 5: The larger size of our diffuser materials allows for even light distribution and the white interior produces few reflections.

Keep your Eyes Open
You can make a light tent out of almost anything that's translucent. Be open for opportunities to use other objects as quick light tents. For example, we found the paint can liner shown in Figure 6 at our local hardware store. It makes a great light tent as the semi-transparent plastic diffuses the light while the curved top creates a seamless environment. Plus, it's durable and should be available for many sessions. There are lots of everyday objects that can be used as well -- we've heard of plastic garbage cans, clear storage containers, empty beer balls, and even white lampshades, as shown in Figure 7, as being excellent options.

Figure 6: This translucent paint can liner made a unique light tent.

Figure 7: One of our most successful light tents involved a small white lampshade and a couple of facial tissues.