In my Instagram feed I see fabulous shots of fountain pen nibs. I do realise many are shot with a macro lens. That said, I should be able to shoot one with the equipment I have … either the 50mm prime lens or the 18-200mm. That’s not really the problem.
I have this gorgeous, two-tone Pelikan nib. Several times I’ve tried, but the two colours won’t show. Either it looks as if it were a stainless steel nib or a gold.
This is what it should look like [photo shamelessly borrowed]:
This is what I come up with:
I don’t know where I go wrong. My nib looks just like the one above in real life. Okay, when I increase saturation, it gets a little colour, but hardly visible to the human eye.
This one I’ve adjusted pretty hard in CameraRAW.
hernibs 
I’ve had similar things happen. Maybe lower the exposure a bit when you shoot in order to pull out the saturation.
What light source are you using? If it’s not natural light then there may be something lacking in the spectrum that is not pulling out the yellow.
We used to have sodium street lighting in the UK. I remember standing at a bus stop one night with my parents and my mother’s red handbag looked grey. The narrow spectrum of the sodium light took all the colour out of the bag. It was a revelation to me – the first time I had observed physics and chemistry doing their thing in the real world. 🙂
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It was natural light, but not very much/good. I will try again, closer to the window. More light might do the trick.
What you said about your mother’s handbag, brought back a memory: I’d bought some lipstick many years ago. We had a fluorescent light in the kitchen. When my, then, husband saw me, he was about to call the ambulance because my lips were blue … I looked totally cyanotic 😊
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[…] indoors. The light was pretty good, though. I dragged out the tripod and gave the nib shooting another go. I’m reasonably happy. It isn’t like the ones I see in InstaGram, but they have […]
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