The brief
The brief was to see whether AI jewellery photography could carry a piece that only existed as a design. That is where a jeweller stands before the first sample is made, with the design settled and nothing yet to photograph.
OSSA is my own concept brand for fine jewellery, so there was no client and no physical piece. I set it up to explore brand-building and product design, starting from my own hand-drawn jewellery design, to show how an original idea could become a complete jewellery campaign before a physical piece existed.
Two pieces carry the collection, a collar necklace and a ring, both organic and fluid with something slightly architectural in the line. The concept sketch sets out the collar in sterling silver at a 15 cm diameter, with an oval smoky quartz where the curve drops and a smaller round one higher up on one side. Both ends are stamped, one 925 and the other OSSA. The ring follows it as an openwork band set with smoky quartz.
The brand, the pieces, the model and the landscapes were all invented for this project, and every frame is made with AI. The finished set is eleven images, from the design sketch through to the campaign: a branded key visual, product images of the necklace and the ring, a still life of both pieces, the jewellery worn on the body, a stone detail and a landscape study. Eight are portrait, two are square and one is a wide landscape.
The direction
I wanted OSSA to read as luxury jewellery imagery rooted in landscape, with the silver set against rock and pale sky rather than a styled fashion world. The palette stays in greys, from pale stone to silver, and the smoky quartz gives the set its darkest tones.
Soft natural daylight was the aim, cool and slightly underexposed, with no harsh highlights on the brushed satin silver.
I cast one woman and built a reference sheet of her, full length and in close-up, before any jewellery went on. Her long braids carry through every worn frame, with waves set into her hairline in the portraits and a pale pink-grey backdrop behind her.
The product frames sit on white, and the still life puts both pieces on pale stone. The land study turns the collar's curve into a silver landscape around a still lake. Together they cover the four images I think any jewellery launch needs.
For references, I kept a short list of jewellers whose look OSSA could sit beside, and another of what it should never resemble.
What was hard
The ring gave me the most trouble. It holds one oval smoky quartz and three round ones, and new generations kept coming back with the wrong number of stones.
Each piece had a master image on white, and the frames were checked against it. A frame with the wrong count went, however good the rest of it was. Backgrounds had a habit of drifting warm, towards beige and sand, so the still lifes were held to a cool, pale grey.
Jewellery on a model also means hands, and hands were the other weak point. The worn frames give her hands something to rest on, her throat in one and her braids in another. Editing carried its own risk, because changing one detail could quietly change her face, so I checked the face against the original before judging anything else.
Scale came from real measurements, a 15 cm collar and a ring face of about 2 cm, which is why the ring sits small beside the collar in the still life.