View allAll Photos Tagged roundbrilliant
Rick & I are engaged. Actually, it's been official since January, & we got the hardware to prove it over a month ago. But said hardware has proven damnably difficult to photograph, & hence I am submitting it to the Most Difficult group (see below). This is the 1st shot I've gotten that I'm at all happy with.
The ring was made by my cousin George Press, who is a jeweler in Livingston, NJ (highly recommended!). We are just thrilled with it. He got us a diamond with a near-perfect cut and a lot of fire. Every time we are in a restaurant lit by recessed spotlighting (or anyplace else with multiple point sources of light) we ooh and ah over the sparkling diamond.
But catching that fire on CCD was very difficult. First of all, I needed a venue with lots of overhead point sources of light. You can't really do a photo shoot in a restaurant (at least not if you expect your dinner companion to go through with the wedding.) I ended up taking this at a church where my chorus (Cantabile) was performing, during some downtime in between run-through and concert.
As usual, the camera didn't want to focus on the top of the diamond. I ended up using manual focus -- one of the few times I've been successful in getting the image sharp (well, on a workable percentage of the shots) using the LCD. Then there was the exposure. The dynamic range between the glints of color & the rest of the ring is so great that it was very hard getting any sort of reasonable exposure of the ring without washing all the color out of the glints. I would like to learn how to combine photos for HDR (high dynamic range) imaging. But then I would need to get 2 photos from exactly the same angle, and brings us to another problem: I don't have a tripod & couldn't find a way to rig the camera so it was resting on something pointing mostly downward (had to be downward for the diamond to catch the light from above, but offset a bit so that the camera didn't shadow the subject), so these were all handheld, & in the indoor lighting that was problematic. I tried going to a higher ISO, but even on ISO 50 (which this shot was taken on), this camera takes very grainy images (another thing I'm pretty unhappy with, in addition to the really crummy glass & a couple of infant-mortality hardware malfunctions). Actually, I would have preferred a shot against black velvet, but that reduced the lighting just too far. I tried just doing a manual exposure with the same parameters that worked on the white background, but it was way too underexposed -- I think a good bit of the light on the ring & diamond must be coming from reflected light off the white background.
Then there was the matter of actually catching the glints of color. It was sparkling like mad with the slightest movement, but actually catching it in the act from a single angle took a lot of trial & error.
Anyway, if anybody has any suggestions (including recommendations on HDR software -- I haven't done any research on that yet) or criticisms, let me know.
Clockwise: Fancy Gray-Violet GIA 0.38 ct (KRS-22); Fancy deep Blue GIA 0.24 ct (KRS-26); Fancy deep Green-Blue GIA 0.15 ct (KRS-27); Fancy intense (➞vivid!) purplish Pink GIA 0.19 ct (KRS-16). – By this immersion method the body color and the color saturation is made more visible.
4.68∼4.70×2.83 mm / 0.38 ct / vs2 / good polish / very good symmetry / GIA 2011 & GGL (Gübelin) 1996 (KRS-22)
The only source of VIOLET (≠ »purple«!) diamonds is the Argyle mine in the eastern Kimberley region of Western Australia; cf. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyle_diamond_mine. – This diamond belongs to type »IaAB+H« according to George Bosshart (GGL) 1996. (11225-038-5-96)
This stone was exhibited at Makuhari Messe 幕張メッセ in February 1996. The diamond looks very similar to the Fancy grayish violet 0.57 ct diamond of fig. 3.47 in »Fancy-Color Diamonds« by Harvey Harris 1994, p. 60, not so much as to the photo in the book, but to the original diamond which I had the chance to see several times in the 1990s.
»Violet« is the rarest hue of natural fancy colored diamonds. The graduation of diamonds with a violet hue (Argyle BL3+ down to BL1) by GIA is very inconsistent and hardly reliable: It ranges from »violetish blue« over »violet« to »grayish violet«, »gray-violet«, »violetish gray«, and »gray«. Even as »grayish blue« or »gray-blue« and »bluish gray« graded diamonds may have the ±dominant hue »violet«.
Round Brilliant cut Demantoid Garnet , 5 carat size, available.
Its simply an affordable green diamond !
Contact for more details.
A recent bespoke platinum engagement ring we have made. Featuring a 0.54ct round brilliant centre diamond with a diamond studded band, simply stunning.
Natural Fancy Gray-Violet (GIA) / Fancy Violet (GGL = Gübelin) Diamond 0.38 ct, lit up from BEHIND. – N°16-75/2 (KRS-22)