Roy Smith <roy DeleteThis @panix.com> wrote:
>I've got to shoot some sailing trophies -- highly polished silver with
>lettering engraved on them. The lettering needs to be readable in the
>photos.
>
>Any non-obvious tricks to get good lighting without lots of glare and
>reflections off the polished surfaces?
A ring light might help, if the surface with the
lettering is flat. Tilt the lettered surface so that
reflections from the ring light are not straight back at
the camera. However, with curved surfaces there isn't
much hope of avoiding at least some glare from the
light.
In that case, consider multiple lights, and also a
"light box" or "light tent". The trick with multiple
lights is to position them such that the glare does not
detract from the object. Generally two lights will do,
and one of those will be at very close to perpendicular
to the axis of the lense. Placement of the other
depends on the glare. With a light box/tent, the idea
is to get diffuse light from every direction, thus
reducing the contrast of the glare.
I prefer a light box, simply because they are so easy to
construct from cardboard boxes. If your trophies are 4
feet tall though, it might be a problem... but there
are solutions for that too.
Do a google search on "light-box glare photography", and
it will provide several examples.
However, in a quick review I didn't see any that showed
the particular construction that I prefer. So I've
resurrected something I had on my web page a couple
years ago for a short time just for one individual to
look at. I dumped about half of it (it was actually to
compare several different alternatives to expensive
"macro lenses", and showed several compartive images),
and have just left the comparison between a ring light
and a light box, plus some images of the light box
showing how it works.
http://web.newsguy.com/floyd_davidson/dime/
--
Floyd L. Davidson <http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd DeleteThis @apaflo.com
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