What the Camera Can’t Do: Why Opal and Enamel Never Photograph True

I want to be honest about something to do with the photographs on my site. They are always a little bit wrong. Not dishonest — I don’t brighten the stones beyond life or paint in colours that aren’t there — but wrong in the way a recording of a song is wrong. Something is present in the room that doesn’t survive being flattened into an image, and with the materials I work in, that something is most of the point.

Start with opal, because opal is the worst offender, and gloriously so. The colour in an opal is not a pigment. There is no green dye, no blue paint, nothing in the stone that is itself coloured. What you see is an event: light entering the stone, striking microscopic, regularly stacked spheres of silica, and being split into colour the way it is in a soap bubble or a peacock’s feather. The colour you see depends entirely on the angle between the light, the stone and your eye. Tilt the stone a few degrees and a sleeping red wakes up; a green you were admiring vanishes. An opal is not a coloured object so much as a slow, directional fire.

Now think about what a camera does. It chooses one angle, one instant, one fixed light, and it freezes them. It captures a single frame of something whose entire nature is movement. The flash of green you would have found by turning the stone toward a window is simply not in the file, because the photograph never turned. We photograph each piece carefully, in good light, from the angle that shows the stone at its most honest — but honest is still one frame of a film.

Enamel fails the camera in the opposite direction. Champlevé colour is built in layers of glass fired into channels engraved in the metal, and its beauty is depth: you are looking down through a clear, glassy surface to the worked metal beneath, the way you look down through water to a riverbed. A screen has no depth. It takes that small, lit, three-dimensional well of colour and presses it into a flat decal. The light that should sink into the piece and come back up to you instead bounces off the glass of your phone.

So how should you read a jewellery photograph, if it can’t be trusted to tell the whole truth? Gently, and in the right direction. Assume the real piece has more in it than the image — more movement in the stone, more depth in the colour, more life in the silver. Look at the photo for the shape, the scale, the design; trust those. For the fire and the depth, give the piece the benefit of the doubt, because the doubt always runs one way.

This, as much as anything, is why I stand at a market every Saturday instead of only selling through a screen. My favourite moment of the week is watching someone who has only ever seen a piece online pick it up for the first time and turn it to the light — and go quiet. That quiet is the piece saying the thing the photograph couldn’t. If you’ve only met my work on a screen so far, come and let a piece finish the sentence in your hand. Saturday mornings have the best light for it.