Photographing shiny metal

Careful lighting will help.

But every professional photographer in the product photo business has a can or two of "matte spray" handy.

Some is even water soluable so that you can wash it off. A light dusting is often enough to kill the specular highlights (a polarizer won't fix this no matter what the others here have said).

Vehicles in big studio shoots are just about drown in matte spray on all things chrome or glass. Highlights are often added later!

DAMHIKT

http://www.shopwiki.com/DULLING+SPRAY

FrankyM said:

seho said:

FrankyM said:

Light reflected from metal is not polarised.

Click to expand...

Depends on the angle of incidence of the light.

The further it deviates from being perpendicular to the metal surface, the more polarized it will be. Even at maximum, though, it won't be as strongly polarized as a same-angle reflection off water or other transparent materials.

See here:

http://www.schneiderkreuznach.com/tipps/polfilter_e.htm

Click to expand...

Your reference says

"Metal surfaces have only a slight polarizing effect on light; consequently, a significant elimination of reflections is not to be achieved."

By "slight" you can understand virtually non existant. Anyway, give it a go and see what you get.

Click to expand...

I have. Figured out 30+ years ago that it didn't have much effect. Like it says, "slight". It's perceptible, but usually not enough to be useful. (Optical physics labs are interesting, even if I didn't end up working in the field.)

Which is not exactly the same as "not polarised".

seho said:

FrankyM said:

seho said:

FrankyM said:

Light reflected from metal is not polarised.

Click to expand...

Depends on the angle of incidence of the light.

The further it deviates from being perpendicular to the metal surface, the more polarized it will be. Even at maximum, though, it won't be as strongly polarized as a same-angle reflection off water or other transparent materials.

See here:

http://www.schneiderkreuznach.com/tipps/polfilter_e.htm

Click to expand...

Your reference says

"Metal surfaces have only a slight polarizing effect on light; consequently, a significant elimination of reflections is not to be achieved."

By "slight" you can understand virtually non existent. Anyway, give it a go and see what you get.

Click to expand...

I have. Figured out 30+ years ago that it didn't have much effect. Like it says, "slight". It's perceptible, but usually not enough to be useful. (Optical physics labs are interesting, even if I didn't end up working in the field.)

Which is not exactly the same as "not polarised".

Click to expand...

Well, the point is that most of the light relected from a metal surface is direct reflection and directly reflected light is not polarised. Of course there is also some diffuse reflection since nothing in the universe is perfect and this is polarised. This, however, is negligible for photographic purposes making the use of polarizing filters a useless exercise. What happens in optical physics labs may be interesting, but irrelevant.

Frank

I have some relevant experience while recovering glossy photographs. If you use a scanner you will get reflections from the light source that will compromise parts of the image - However if you rescan with the photograph rotated by 180 degrees the reflections will be in different locations and the two images can be combined in Photoshop as layers with the blending mode of the upper layer set to "darken". The reflections on the lower image layer will be canceled out while those in the upper layer will not show either.

Possibly just using a point light source and moving it between exposures while keeping the camera fixed would allow the same trick to be used with your dog tags - or maybe images from a scanner are just what you need anyway.

lots of advice on eliminating highlights/reflections

But it occurs to me you might want to include some highlights to emphasize the shininess or curves of the object.

I'm thinking in terms of a point source light (high intensity LED, or perhaps several in a line)

In car photos I've seen, reflections of grid lighting can really bring out the contours, especially on a black car.
LED could be mounted in a wire armature painted to match the backdrop.

No, I haven't tried this, just played w spotlights and LED flashlights to get various effects...

Not polished metal, but this tomato was lighted by regular floodlight (left), red floodlight (right) and LED spotlight (front)



--
Art P
Select images may be seen here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sigvarius/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cecropia_grove/