Just call me... "Darkroom Dangerous"

After literally years of experimentation, not to mention hundreds of dollars shelled out for equipment, etc., I am finally moving in a direction that I really like for photographing my beads and jewelry. For me, it has started to come together by using a decent quality tripod, a "frosted" acrylic cutting board, a piece of driftwood, and my camera set on MANUAL.

The pictures below were taken with very little lighting in my basement on a countertop I purchased to use as my jewelry workbench. On the countertop, I put down 4 small wooden blocks, then I put the cutting board on the blocks. That raises the board up and "blurs" the countertop. (I've also seen this done over gradiant paper.) Then I set the drift wood on the acrylic board and placed my beads and jewlery on it using sticky dots if necessary. Finally, I set the I set the camera's aperture manually (although it didn't seem to matter what I set it to) and let the camera do the work. After I imported the images, I did some minor touchup in Photoshop and... Voila! (Thank you Jesus!!)