What is the best way of taking pictures of rings/jewerly with a digital camera?

For jewelry place a black velvety back ground,
try to stand up the jewelry with one of those dot glue so popular now for the use of book scrapping
Bring the picture closed but to that closed, it is better to crop the picture.
Take two or more photography.
use your better Judgment

If you have a lens attachment that has a macro then you can do really good job.

Otherwise, you just have to do it by the seat of your pants - i.e., do the best you can.

Specialized photography needs special equipment. But I guess you are taking these pictures for safekeeping and insurance purposes, just in case they get stolen or something.

Insurance, if that is what your intention is, would like to see those jewellery worn by you or on a person. This way you can prove the ownership. Otherwise they may question the validity of the photos.

if you are taking this for a catalogue or something, sorry, you have to spend extra bucks to get special equipment.

You did not say what kind of camera you have or what special lenses you have. May be I can help further if only I knew.

If you really want to make the items snap you can place them on a small piece of blue velvet. (I'm talking about diamonds and silver pieces. If they have multiple colors select pieces of velvet that complement the items.)

A trick to make the pieces sparkle is to use a small light tent. If you're not careful the photographer's and camera's reflection will show in the highlights of the jewelry. If you are going to shoot several pieces over an extended period of time you might create a rigid "light tent" from an old cake dish cover (they're circular, about 18 inches across and 8 inches tall. If you cut a small hole in the center of the frosted white plastic the camera lens can fit through. If shooting outdoors, the sunlight will be diffused through the plastic creating an even light. If the piece is too far away under the plastic just place several paperback books under the velvet to raise the item into focus range.

This is a fast and dirty way for getting soft even lighting on reflective surfaces. This is not catalog technique but it works for eBay.

Use your macro setting and experiment. Let's say you have a point and shoot camera with macro and a flash on the camera. You might have to go to a manual mode to do this, but...

Put your ring on a nice background surface. I like to just put it in a ring box. Zoom out at least half-way so that you will be working about a foot away from the ring. Be sure that you get focus confirmation. Shoot a picture USING flash. Check the LCD for the result. If you have overexposed the ring, use the EV adjustment to reduce the exposure. For small items, I often find that I need to reduce the exposure by about 1.0 EV. (That's -1.0 EV.) It is better to have the ring properly exposed and the background underexposed, so just worry about the ring for now. Using a deliberate underexposure will cure the "too shiny" appearance of the stones.

If you know how, you can use either full manual exposure or just Aperture Priority and choose a smaller aperture (larger number) to make the ring show up in better focus.

If you have a DSLR, post your question again stating the kind of camera that you have and the lens that you are using and we will give more details.

If you are doing any image processing at all, such with Photoshop or it's cousins, you can crop the image to 800 pixels by 800 pixels and use Supersize images on eBay. I always use the Picture Pack when I am selling anything of any value.

Check out http://www.members.aol.com/swf08302/hear... which I did a while ago using a Nikon Coolpix 5400 exactly as described above. I do NOT think this is acceptable, but we decided not to sell the ring anyhow, so I didn't bother to do a better job. It's still better than some I've seen. I don't keep old photos of sold items around, so I don't have much to show you, but at least you know that it's possible to get an acceptable result even without spending huge dollars on your equipment.

The key things to remember are:
-Macro setting
-Zoom out to get about a foot away from your subject
-Use flash
-Try different EV settings and expect that you will end up with a negative EV setting, such as -1.0 EV.

Hi, I recommand you to try google picasa.

picasa is a Google's photo software. It's what should've come with your camera.

It can Edit , organise and Share you picture and small video flips.

It's very easy to use and is free, just like Google

Download it free in here:

http://www.bernanke.cn/google-picasa/

Good Luck!