Lighting metal texture and black plastic

[Tyler Clark]

Can anyone give tips on shooting metal objects and black plastic objects?

 

Any tips on evoking specular patterns in the metal would be awesome as well!

[David Mullen ASC]

Usually people are trying to minimize specular reflections in shiny surfaces since they are so mirror-like. Instead they use large soft sources to reflect over the shiny surface. You may need a combination of both -- large white surfaces to reflect in the black plastic and metal surface and an extreme raking edge-on hard light to bring out any surface texture in the metal that you want to have some kicks off of.

 

Specular reflections are the easy part, you just point a bunch of small hard lights at the shiny surface and get a lot of hot spots.

 

Black shiny surfaces are basically dark mirrors, you want to think about what you want to see reflected in it.

[Aapo Lettinen]

sometimes you may also need wide/tall and narrow reflections which can be made with for example single Kino tubes. this may be handy when lighting for example motorcycle helmets, you can get a vertical narrow reflection to the visor that way