Reflections

Photographing shiny objects can be very challenging due to the direct reflections they produce (that is, reflections where the light leaves the subject at the same angle it arrived, as opposed to diffused reflections where the light leaves at all angles equally. These reflections can be distracting and hide small details on the subject which is undesirable, especially in product photography.

I'm not an arts and crafts type person, and even getting the tracing paper 'cone' to behave proved frustrating; it ended up more like a rough tube, and I took a before and after shot which is enough to demonstrate the technique. For a subject I chose some silver coins, and placed them on black felt.

 

85mm, f/8, 1/10s, ISO 100

 This first image is without the tracing paper tube. I held the light source above the coins to generate as much direct reflection as I could back to the camera. You can see that the lighting on the coins is very harsh due to the hard light source; it is also uneven, with the bottom of the twenty pence piece darker than the top of the coin, and the fifty pence pieces being especially bright. This is obscuring some of the fine details such as the curls of the Queen's hair in the lowest coin, and the text around the circumference. This type of lighting is also causing dark shadows around the edges where there is relief on the coins. Overall, this is a very contrasty image.

 

85mm, f/8, 1s, ISO 100

There is an immediate difference in this image. The coins and the end of the camera lens are now inside the tracing paper tube, and I've also brought the light source to the side so as not to shine any light directly into the end of the tube.  The light, shining through the paper, is now a diffuse light source, and the coins are reflecting their surroundings - the diffuse light through the tube.

The cone (or tube in my case) used in this exercise is essentially a homemade light tent. If I had one of those I'd certainly have experimented more with angles and different objects.