Jewelry Photography and Africa...

Sometimes it is great to use those photography techniques that I haven't used since college. In my studio photography class (somewhere in the early 90's) one of our assignments was to photography jewelry, or at least, something very shiny. This can be tough because you have to use a "lighting tent" to keep from having a bunch of specular highlights. I of course don't use this technique in my daily photography since people aren't usually all that shiny. However, I recently had to remember all this stuff from 15 or so years ago.

For those who don't know...my wife and I are adopting a baby from Ethiopia. Hopefully sometime in the next year we will be home with our little boy or girl. We are very excited and very impatient. In order to pass the time, I decided to make my wife and I a silver necklace in the shape of Africa to wear as a daily reminder. After I finished ours we had an outpouring of interest in purchasing them. So....I went to work and made a few more and we will see how they sell. Thus...why we needed a photo of a piece of jewelry. I don't think it came out too bad!
We are still trying to decide what to do with the profits from selling the necklaces. We would like to use them to support (at least in part) some African educational charity. Anyway, life leads us in circles sometimes and I had to go back to my past to remember how to do a photo that will affect our future.