Great lighting for dark backgrounds

Touch Of Gold

I thought I would take some jewellery shots, got up in the morning and went to Ikea intending to buy a black plastic board so that i might get some nice reflection. We spent a long time at Ikea and finally all we did was have some nice meat balls and a fillet of cod :) and came back home without any reflective surface. It was when I reached home that I noticed that our TV stand is black and reflective so thought I would give it a shot.

This shot is taken with 105mm lens with a long exposure of 0.01sec ISO 200 during which I painted on some light using a small LED torch. I always take my photos in RAW format and camera in 'Manual' mode. I downloaded it with Nikon transfer, imported it to Lightroom 3, adjusted white balance, contrast, fill light, vibrance and saturation and then exported it to photoshop CS5 using Cmd+E (Mac) or Ctrl+E (Win). In photoshop, I added a frame and adjusted the curves. You can view the Exif info over here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/liveview_4u/4845761353/meta/