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Advice on shooting a highly reflective object?


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Hi all! Searched the forums and couldn't find what I was looking for. Hoping to get some advice on the following:

I'm shooting an ad next week for a tech start-up which will sell a very shiny, reflective, orb-shaped device. We will be shooting it on location, in home environments. Picture of the device here: https://imgur.com/a/z5XhTT1

I don't have much experience shooting reflective surfaces besides glassware. Can anyone provide tips / advice / insight / hacks for how you like to approach this problem? I've done a good bit of research but I'm still not feeling confident going into the shoot. Seeing environmental reflections is okay, I just don't want to see myself (or gear as much as possible).

I should mention that I'll also be shooting plates without the device, and also reverse wides from the device POV for their post team to use to create "reflections" digitally.

Thanks in advance for any help!

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Use long lenses and stay further back so your reflection is smaller.

Use large solids behind camera. A T-bone may look better than a solid frame if you need to avoid seeing stands. 

If possible, light from outside the room and with practicals.

Since your device is curved like a sphere, a lot of problematic reflections will come from 3/4 back and above/below. So if you still want edge lighting and texture on the object, you may want to consider bouncing large lights onto the walls/floors from a distance to increase natural reflections, rather than lighting the object directly. 

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You have to accept that when shooting a spherical reflective object that everything in front and around the sides will be reflected.  So the issue is to make the light reflections acceptable or interesting or motived and the hide the camera reflection.

It helps to back up and use a longer lens to make the reflection of the camera smaller, then perhaps you can shoot through a hole in a black card so all that is reflected is a black shape.

Either the lights reflected have to be practical (windows, lamps, etc.) or very neatly formed movie lights (perfect neat-edged squares, rectangles, circles of even white light.) Avoid having visible grip support equipment surrounding the lights. This is why large Chimeras were popular before there were Litemats, etc.

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