D3200 for taking shots of jewelry

Is the D3200 a good camera for taking shots of jewelry? Is the 18-55mm the right lens for it? If not, then which one?

I have no photography experience but I need to take nice photos of jewelry, so I'm going to get that table top studio from mystudio. Also, I want to go with a DSLR over a point and shoot because the image quality is important to me. Is there any other camera that is better than the D3200 that you would recommend for me?
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Comments

  • larry12larry12
    edited August 2014
    bruto, that picture you posted of that ring, how did you get that blurred background?
  • larry12larry12
    edited August 2014
    How come on B&H it says 1 year warranty, and on Adorama it says 1 year on the camera and 5yrs on the lens? So on B&H is the one year warranty on the camera lens or both?
  • brutobruto
    edited August 2014
    A: The blurred background on the shot was from shooting with the lens wide open and close up. Depth of field is less when the aperture is large, and decreases logarithmically with distance. At normal distances the kit lens is a bit slow and tends not to give a terribly pleasing out of focus background. This one reason many people like the fast 35mm and 50mm prime lenses for portraits and the like, but this one still allows some manipulation of depth of field at close distances.

    B: The standard warranty is one year, but Nikon offers an extension to 5 years on the lens. Mine came with that added warranty, as did the 55-300mm I got at the same time. The link to the specs on the lens mentions it. You should get two warranty slips in the lens box.
  • ohyeaharohyeahar
    edited August 2014
    I’m pretty sure B&H also offers the same 5 year warranty on the lens. If you open the link for the lens on their page, it says it has the 5 year warranty.

    To understand how to blur backgrounds, see the last 3 links over here:
    http://forums.cameratips.com/discussion/2177/simple-explanations-with-examples-of-basic-photography-knowledge

    BTW, you may want to check out the deals here:
    http://www.adorama.com/l/Cameras/Nikon~Digital-SLR-Cameras?sel=Model_Nikon-D3200|FilterBy_NewConditionOnly&Startat=1&sf=Price
  • larry12larry12
    edited August 2014
    ohyeahar and bruto thanks a ton for your help.
    I just ordered the D3200 from B&H with the mystudio ms20j.
  • brutobruto
    edited August 2014
    Good for you. I think you'll like it. Make sure you download the full PDF version of the manual to your computer, because it has more in it than the paper one. The disk contains that and a copy of View NX2, which will allow you to process RAW files in various useful ways. Study up on the auto-focus and ISO options and the like, which can be a little daunting at first. Once you get the hang of it, it's pretty easy to change things on the fly.

    We'll be interested in seeing some results.
  • larry12larry12
    edited August 2014
    So I got the camera and it's all good. I can take nice photos of everything except for my jewelry. I just can't get it to focus when the camera is so close. Do you guys have any suggestions? Do I just need to get a macro lens?
  • ohyeaharohyeahar
    edited August 2014
    Get as close as possible while maintaining focus. The minimum focusing distance of the 18-55mm is about 11 inches.
    Take the shot, then crop in closer in post-production.
  • brutobruto
    edited August 2014
    The 18-55mm kit lens focuses down to 11 inches (distance from object to sensor plane, which means the lens end is much closer), and it does this at all focal lengths giving you a pretty close shot when set at 55 mm. The image ratio is close to 3:1 which is pretty good but not really true macro. Exactly what qualifies as macro varies with who is selling the lens, but it should be either 2:1 or 1:1. Explanation of ratio: 1:1 means that a millimeter object shot will be a millimeter in size on the sensor itself. Thus, if you aim a 1:1 lens at a bug that is 15x23 millimeters in size, it will fill the frame. Shooting straight down at a wedding ring, a 1:1 lens would approximately fill the frame on the long dimension, and you'd have to go out to about 1.5 to 1 to avoid clipping the top and bottom. As you get closer and more macro, depth of field decreases and focus gets fussier.

    Before you give up on this, if you are having trouble focusing but are not getting closer than 11 inches, it may well be that the auto focus cannot find what it needs. Try manual focusing, and make sure you have experimented with all the different auto focus options too. At close range, multi-point focusing will likely make bad guesses. For small stationary things, you're likely best off with either single point AF or manual focus. AF must find an area of contrast or it will not lock on. Notice that in manual focus, you can still use the camera's focus point as a guide, and a little green dot will illuminate when that focus point is correct. There is also a "rangefinder" option that you can enable from the menu, which will show you a little bar graph in the viewfinder, indicating which direction you're off focus, centering when it's right. That option does not exist in manual mode, and replaces the bar graph for exposure compensation, so you may prefer not to use it.

    If you need to get closer, you can try a diopter-style macro attachment (there's one reviewed on this site, i think), which is just a magnifying lens that goes on the end of the lens. These work well up to a point, but may distort along the edges, and tend to be a little fussy about exact focus. The range is pretty small. Compared to a true macro lens though, this is a cheap alternative. The one reviewed here is said to be pretty good, and clips on to a lens. There are others made which screw in, and come in varying strengths. While not as nice as a true macro lens, they are extremely portable, making them a useful thing to put in your camera bag. I don't use these much any more, but used to have a set for film shooting when lenses tended to be less macro-friendly, and cropping was not so easy.

    Remember too that if you have to move out a little from what you're shooting, you are using a camera with a 24 megapixel sensor, which means you can crop a picture a fair amount before you lose much quality. If you are going to reduce your shots for a catalog or for the web, there is plenty of room to crop. Make sure you set your camera to save files in the largest format. If possible, save in RAW mode as well, for the best sharpness and manipulation. You can always save images in JPG too. Even in the camera, if you like the RAW image as you see it, you can convert it to JPG on the spot.

    Edit to add: as usual, I'm a slow poster with too many other things going on at once, and ohyeahar has ninjaed me again. His short version, my long. About the same.
  • brutobruto
    edited August 2014
    Playing around this morning, I took the D3200 and the kit lens, and put my poor old wedding ring on top of a book. I took a handheld shot at ISO 3200 in natural light, f/11 at about 50 mm, focused on the back side of the ring. It's not at the absolute max macro point, but close. I then opened the RAW image in Irfanview and downsized it to a mere 1000 pixels wide, and then saved it at 48% quality in JPG. The RAW to JPG converter in Irfanview is pretty decent. You will see the resulting image. If you look closely, you will see that there are some nasty JPG compression artifacts on the white of the book cover. It's way inferior to the original full sized image, but it could be worse. And, of course, it's pushing the noise envelope at such a high ISO. It would have been much clearer on a tripod at ISO 100.

    Then I cropped from that downsized picture, and the crop is shown here. That's pretty lousy quality by photographic standards, under 500 pixels wide, saved again at 48 percent quality as a JPG with no attempts to enhance it. It's pretty messy when enlarged, but when shown small on the screen, it's really not so bad. You can certainly tell what it's a picture of. A person seeing this in a web catalog, for example, could not complain later that he didn't notice that it was beat up and not very round!

    I was purposely quite drastic here, demonstrating that with some care you can accomplish a lot with this rig if you are careful.

    The original, downsized to 1000x665 and saved at 48 percent with no enhancement:
    https://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/720x479q90/538/MzuMiI.jpg

    The crop, from the downsized image, saved again at 48 percent with no enhancement:
    https://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/423x341q90/911/UYDfrJ.jpg
  • ohyeaharohyeahar
    edited August 2014
    For maximum sharpness when shooting an inanimate object, definitely stabilize your camera (i.e. tripod). Remember to turn off VR on the lens.
    Shoot in Aperture Priority mode.
    Set ISO at 100.
    Stop down the aperture to f/8 (which is where this lens is at its sharpest).
    Get to your lens’s minimum focus distance (about 11 inches for the 18-55mm).
    Zoom all the way in and achieve focus.
    Use either the timer release or remote release to trigger the shutter.
    Crop in post-production.

    The level of detail you can get by doing this is amazing. Here’s a shot I took last night.
    http://jasoncheung123.tumblr.com/post/95694900753

    (I used a different body and lens than you, but you should be able to do the same or better. Your D3200 actually gives marginally better image quality than my D5100. I used a 17-50mm f/2.8, but since I’m stopping down the aperture, there’s no advantage to be had over the 18-55mm lens.)

    The subsequent pictures are just the same shot cropped closer and closer.

    With your MyStudio lighting setup and the higher megapixel count of your D3200, you should be able to do even better!

    (I realized as I was cropping that perhaps I shouldn’t have used my watch as the subject. If you look at the seconds hand, there’s actually some motion blur since it’s always ticking and the shutter speed used was 2.5 seconds.)
  • brutobruto
    edited August 2014
    Dude, you stay up too late.

    Well, before I retire, here goes another shot, in which I more or less duplicate yours with the D3200 and the 18-55mm kit lens.

    The light is dim. The camera is set on a tripod with VR off, AF on, lens at 55mm, f/8, ISO 100, aperture priority, long exposures. I used the IR remote control set at a 2 second delay. Focus is single point, centered on the watch's number 3.

    I did not do any post processing of sharpness or other settings. The camera is set to factory defaults for standard color.

    I have a screw-in 2X eyepiece magnifier (in addition to the smaller one posted about earlier), and as an experiment I used that for a second shot with very careful manual focus. The AF shot was a tiny bit sharper! I cannot guarantee that every D3200 is as precisely on-focus as this, but mine is very good.

    Original pictures are saved to RAW (NEF) files, and converted to approximately 75% JPG in ViewNX2 which came with the camera.

    After that save, I downsampled the original picture in Irfanview to 1000 pixel width with further compression.

    The cropped detail was made in View NX2 from the RAW file, and saved as a JPG from there at about 75 % compression, with no further processing.

    So here is my watch (not as nice as the previous one, because my Seiko got squashed in a bicycle accident), sitting on the kitchen table under the dim light.

    https://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/720x479q90/905/xbfbVV.jpg

    And here is a detail of the watch. Note that the depth of field at f/8 in macro is such that even the bezel is a bit soft when the focus was set on the 3, and that the crystal is a bit cloudy, but note how sharp the stem is:

    https://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/628x429q90/903/04PjYS.jpg

    The 18-55mm lens is not the absolute sharpest tool in the shed, but I think you can see that it's pretty darn good.
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