I’ve been going cross-eyed all this week from looking at photos of the diamondthrills jewellery collection.

We spent two days taking the shots at the end of last week, mostly product shots – i.e. photos of each piece of jewellery on its own – but also some model shots of the jewellery being worn by our friendly model, Amber.

The photoshoot produced nearly 700 images of our inaugural collection of 15 carefully chosen jewellery pieces, and the photographer, Laurence, has spent most of last weekend and this week trying to pick out the best shots and playing around with the background tone and contrast.

The ‘shortlist’ of about 160 images was put into a temporary online gallery in three categories – earrings, necklaces, and bracelets – so that they could be reviewed by me and by others.

The aim: to reduce the original 700 images to around 75 – a 90% rejection rate – for the 15 pieces in the inaugural diamondthrills jewellery collection.

Photography of diamonds and diamond jewellery is very tricky and there’s a lot of very poor photography of diamond jewellery out there, especially on the Internet.

The key thing is to find ways to bring out the brilliance of the diamonds and to achieve that naturally; it’s definitely not the done thing to add artifical computer-generated sparkles in post-production.

Special lighting is used and the camera is often set to a very shallow depth-of-field so that one part of the jewellery is sharply in focus (i.e. the diamonds) whilst much of the rest of the piece is out of focus in the background.

The model shots are useful because they allow the online browser to imagine how the jewellery might look being worn by them, but also because they provide scale – we’ve shown pictures of earrings to women whose first question was: but how long are they?

We think we’ve got some great shots, especially of one of our ‘flagship’ pieces of jewellery – a spectacular diamond and white gold bangle – and we hope that you will agree with us when you see the images online soon. We’re on course to get the online diamondthrills gallery up and running by the end of August.

The product selection was important, of course, but the photography is vital too because we want to get you as excited as we are about the beautiful diamond jewellery that we’ve picked for diamondthrills.

We’re especially pleased that the diamonds are shining brilliantly in many of the photos because for us here at diamondthrills that’s actually what this jewellery is all about.

We’re primarily an online business and so we need the imagery to be good enough to show the diamonds and jewellery through the medium of the web.

Lots of traditional jewellers believe that you can’t do this sort of diamond jewellery business online: we’re going to prove them wrong, firstly by having photography that gives you the confidence that the jewellery looks stunning, and secondly by always offering you a 100% money-back guarantee if you’re not satisfied, whether you’re renting or buying diamond jewellery from us.

Happily, we think that the photos do full justice to the jewels, and we look forward to being able to get the goods online within the next month.

So whether you want to hire stunning bridal jewellery for your wedding, or rent dazzling diamonds for a party, or even buy something special from our carefully selected collection, we are confident that our photography and our service will satisfy your diamond jewellery needs.