How to photograph wedding rings standing up?

I'm getting into more weddings and need to figure out how to take photos of wedding rings standing up.  I've seen others photos, but can't figure out how they managed this?  

I thought they used plyers of some sort and then cloned them out, but that doesn't seem to be a good option after trying. 

Thank you for any help.  

You can use a small piece of putty for each ring to stand them up.  

A product called Fun-Tac is great for attaching the rings together. It holds better than regular modeling clay and has all kinds of uses. My mom used it to keep her cats from knocking things off the shelves. She had everything held in place with Fun-Tac. I recently saw it for sale in the household & auto section of my local grocery store.

I use it for temporarily attaching things together for still life shoots of tiny and table top items, but a few years back when doing weddings, I would attach the rings together and then fit them into the center of the wedding bouquet in such a way that about the top half of each ring stood proud above the flowers. A few shots of them from different zooms and angles under good light always provided several great shots to choose from.

Charley

100% agree, this is what I use and it works great

Once you open that, keep it in a sandwich bag as that putty will dry out fast.  You can even put a few drops of water in with it to keep it moist.  

Hey thanks guys.  But does it come in white?  I'm only seeing blue.  I'll get, but prefer white as that will hide easier.  

Before being manufactured and sold by Loctite it was a light green. That's the only other color that I've ever seen it in. The package photo above shows it in 5 long strips, but these strips are indented to produce an easier separation point for small pieces. There is a plastic sheet backing, as well as a clear facing piece of plastic with the blue Fun-Tak held in between them, inside the Loctite cardboard package. A knife or scissors works well to cut them free after the surface plastic piece has been peeled back to expose the needed amount. There are 80 pieces of about 1/2 X 1/4 X 1/8" thick if you separate them at these indent marks. I used about 1/3 of one of these pieces, squeezed and shaped by my fingers and then placed on the first ring where the other would touch it, then I pressed the other ring into this piece of Fun-Tak on the first ring. It is re-useable and repositionable so you can adjust the rings a bit after sticking them together.  Use the flowers to hold the rings in place and the Fun-Tak to hold them together.

Charley

Incredible, thank you Charley, good advice.  Do you do many weddings yourself?  

"Incredible, thank you Charley, good advice. Do you do many weddings yourself?"

Not any more, except for my grand daughter's wedding 4 years ago. I'm getting too old and with too much wrong with me to be as reliable and agile as is required for doing good wedding photo shoots. I can no longer quickly move around while carrying two cameras and other needed items. I still have the dual camera harness and oversize fanny packs for spare batteries, lenses, memory cards, etc., but I don't use them any more.

My grand daughter, now an adult and married, can have them if she decides to do weddings. I took the time to train her in the basics several years ago, and then gave her a Canon T7 with 50 mm lens, tripod, light stands, batteries, umbrellas, memory cards, speedlites, etc and she is calling or coming back for additional training and problem solving whenever she needs it. She will likely inherit the contents of my studio when I am gone.

I'll be 82 next month and I have metal knees from a firefighting accident, plus 8 heart surgeries, and I survived cancer twice in the past 24 years. I shouldn't still be here but I am, and I'm not sure why. I spend most of my free time experimenting with photography and lighting in my small studio upstairs in my home, or working out in my shop. I'm a "Maker" who has long been creating things that I want/need, if buying it wasn't possible financially, because it didn't exist, or because I didn't like their design. Some furniture in my home was built in my shop. I had a welding/metal working shop too, but gave the contents of it to my #2 son across town when they installed a pacemaker in me and told me that I had to stay away from high energy sparks. I go to his shop and have him make the sparks for me, but usually do the rest of the fabrication work myself now.

Because my studio is only 19' X 26' with an 8' ceiling (biggest constraint), I designed and built a ceiling lighting support grid with power, so I can hang my lights and other things from the studio ceiling. The ceiling grid is 10' wide because of the width of my 6 motorized backdrops, and 24' long, but I can cantilever support out beyond the sides of the grid, if I should wish to hang a light out near a side wall. I can easily hang anything less than about 20 lbs anywhere within this room area, and power is available along the sides of the grid on the ceiling, so within 5' of anywhere that I hang a light. I still use C Stands, when the light will need to move often, but power for the light now comes from the ceiling outlets above. There are no wires and nearly no tripods ever on my studio floor, so a very minimum of tripping hazards. I use camera stands instead of tripods for my still and video cameras. They require less floor space and have matching ball heads, so the quick attach plates are interchangeable. Everything hung from this ceiling grid has a safety cable, since the lighting attachment spigots are just one point connect and unreliable when inverted with a light hanging from above. Even my tether cable is from above, but with enough slack in my usual camera location to allow free movement in about 1/2 of the room and I have an extension for the tether cable, if I should ever need it.

I have wireless controls for powering the lights, triggering the flash, raising/lowering the backdrops, etc. all from the camera location, so changing from portrait photography with flash, to making videos with constant light or back to portrait flash in the same space takes me about 10 minutes. I even have a setup to do macro photography in one corner of the studio. The ceiling height is my biggest constraint, but raising it would be a major expense, so I won't be changing it. Though I've wanted my own photo/video studio since about 1960, this is the first that I've owned, and it will likely be my last. I will be glad to help anyone with questions about how I made my studio, if they should wish to duplicate any part of it.

Charley

CharleyL wrote: "Incredible, thank you Charley, good advice. Do you do many weddings yourself?"

Not any more, except for my grand daughter's wedding 4 years ago. I'm getting too old and with too much wrong with me to be as reliable and agile as is required for doing good wedding photo shoots. I can no longer quickly move around while carrying two cameras and other needed items. I still have the dual camera harness and oversize fanny packs for spare batteries, lenses, memory cards, etc., but I don't use them any more.

My grand daughter, now an adult and married, can have them if she decides to do weddings. I took the time to train her in the basics several years ago, and then gave her a Canon T7 with 50 mm lens, tripod, light stands, batteries, umbrellas, memory cards, speedlites, etc and she is calling or coming back for additional training and problem solving whenever she needs it. She will likely inherit the contents of my studio when I am gone.

I'll be 82 next month and I have metal knees from a firefighting accident, plus 8 heart surgeries, and I survived cancer twice in the past 24 years. I shouldn't still be here but I am, and I'm not sure why. I spend most of my free time experimenting with photography and lighting in my small studio upstairs in my home, or working out in my shop. I'm a "Maker" who has long been creating things that I want/need, if buying it wasn't possible financially, because it didn't exist, or because I didn't like their design. Some furniture in my home was built in my shop. I had a welding/metal working shop too, but gave the contents of it to my #2 son across town when they installed a pacemaker in me and told me that I had to stay away from high energy sparks. I go to his shop and have him make the sparks for me, but usually do the rest of the fabrication work myself now.

Because my studio is only 19' X 26' with an 8' ceiling (biggest constraint), I designed and built a ceiling lighting support grid with power, so I can hang my lights and other things from the studio ceiling. The ceiling grid is 10' wide because of the width of my 6 motorized backdrops, and 24' long, but I can cantilever support out beyond the sides of the grid, if I should wish to hang a light out near a side wall. I can easily hang anything less than about 20 lbs anywhere within this room area, and power is available along the sides of the grid on the ceiling, so within 5' of anywhere that I hang a light. I still use C Stands, when the light will need to move often, but power for the light now comes from the ceiling outlets above. There are no wires and nearly no tripods ever on my studio floor, so a very minimum of tripping hazards. I use camera stands instead of tripods for my still and video cameras. They require less floor space and have matching ball heads, so the quick attach plates are interchangeable. Everything hung from this ceiling grid has a safety cable, since the lighting attachment spigots are just one point connect and unreliable when inverted with a light hanging from above. Even my tether cable is from above, but with enough slack in my usual camera location to allow free movement in about 1/2 of the room and I have an extension for the tether cable, if I should ever need it.

I have wireless controls for powering the lights, triggering the flash, raising/lowering the backdrops, etc. all from the camera location, so changing from portrait photography with flash, to making videos with constant light or back to portrait flash in the same space takes me about 10 minutes. I even have a setup to do macro photography in one corner of the studio. The ceiling height is my biggest constraint, but raising it would be a major expense, so I won't be changing it. Though I've wanted my own photo/video studio since about 1960, this is the first that I've owned, and it will likely be my last. I will be glad to help anyone with questions about how I made my studio, if they should wish to duplicate any part of it.

Charley

Now just word of the wise or experienced.  Air is the enemy with this stuff, keep it zipped up in ziplock baggie.  

Good tip, thank you

The LocTite Brand comes with clear flat plastic top and bottom with the edges fully exposed. This 3 layer pack is slid into a windowed cardboard sleeve package with a zip strip sealed closure. It is in no way tightly sealed, yet I have several packages that are several years old and they are still very flexible and pliable. From my experience, and the way that it comes packaged, I don't think you will need to worry about it drying out quickly. They would have used a more sealed packaging if this had been the case.

In fact, when we were cleaning out my mom's house and removing all of the vases, displayed China, and other items off the shelves, all of the original light green FunTac that she had used to hold these in place and safe from the cats was still very flexible, and as I moved along removing these items I was also removing the FunTac from each item and the shelves and building a large tennis ball sized ball of it in one hand. It was fully ready to be used again, except for maybe the dust and cat hair contamination. But if you feel a need to seal it in a zip lock bag I don't think doing it will hurt any. It will certainly keep it off of other things that you pack together with it. I just leave it in it's original package, removing tiny bits as needed, then put the original package back together and return it to my camera bag.

Charley  

I don't shoot the rings by themself, for me, I think the hands complete the meaning behind the unity of two people.  

Package arrived and this is perfect.  Thanks again for the tip