Sacred Sunbeam Earrings – A photography journey. Creative Series – Rachel Grose

Brief

Slow Crafting – Sacred Sunbeam Earrings

I have been creating handcrafted jewellery for over 20 years. Designing and crafting with care and precision, using only high quality gemstones and precious metals. I use traditional techniques with hand tools to create one of a kind or very limited edition jewellery. Each stone is handpicked for its unique beauty and quality. I wanted to use this Creative Series as an opportunity to document some of the many processes it takes to create a ‘one of a kind’ pair of earrings. Culminating in a series of final images that show the finished pieces in a way that captures the beauty, value and wearability of handcrafted jewellery.

Moodboard

Here are some inspiring images from Pinterest that shaped the photography for this series

Test shots narrowed down from 756 to 29 images…!

Making the Earrings

The actual manufacture and processes used to create hand-crafted jewellery can be just as fascinating and beautiful as the finished creations. Here are some of the steps taken to create these earrings including, soldering, filing, hand-sawing the silhouettes, pickling, stone-setting and polishing.

Experimenting with Editing

Some techniques used included “Sky Masking”, masking of the hand and bringing up the exposure and saturation, texture, clarity and sharpening of the earrings as well as adding a blue hue to the labradorite gemstones.

Couldn’t resist playing with the “Sin City’ Focal point in colour from one of the earlier tasks in this course. Technique of masking, separating the background and taking down the saturation slider to -100

Technique used in photoshop editing creating a Coloured Texture Overlay. These background stock images were downloaded from “Unsplash” and uploaded over my original image and then adjusting the blending modes and Opacity.