How to photograph silver – an amateur’s guide
When I first started out as a dealer in antique silver, without doubt the hardest aspect of my new career was photography. I tried using professional photographers but they were expensive, involved frustrating delays and ultimately took photos that I was not very happy with. It turns out photographing silver is just about the hardest thing to do in the world of photography. It requires a specialist professional photographer – not easy to find. It is not just the myriad of reflections you have to deal with, but getting silver to look like clean shiny silver in a photograph is in fact very tricky. Over the past five years I have crawled up, as well as down, the learning curve. I have reached the point where I am finally satisfied with most of my photographs. By popular demand, and with the time and boredom created by “lock-down”, I thought I would share my experience for others’ benefit. This write up is full of links so that you can see what I mean by clicking on highlighted blue areas. There is a photo of my set up at the end of this article. I am still learning, and if anyone would like to offer improvements to this approach, do please let me know.
