Photography Breadth Assignment #15

Reflective or Transparent Surfaces

Focus: Pattern, Form Contrast, Balance, Repetition, Rhythm, Movement

Goal: Reflective: Your photographs should emphasize pattern being reflected in objects. Play with different fabrics and different reflective objects

Transparent: Your photographs should emphasize form and contrast.

Some Tips to Photographing reflective Surfaces: Photographing reflective surfaces and objects is usually quite challenging, and can easily turn the work of the photographer into a frustrating task.

Reflections are a hard to tame-beast, but it gets easier to control if you know the rules. So, in this article, I will show you how to create a high impact image with controlled reflections, like the one below, with a really simple, but highly effective, technique and using equipment you most certainly already own.

It all comes down to the basic principles of light and the way it behaves, which is in fact very predictable. The law of reflection explains this phenomenon. If you project a ray of light on a flat reflective surface like a mirror, then the angle of incidence equals de angle of reflection, like the following diagram illustrates:

So, physics apart, what this really means is that if you are trying to photograph a reflective surface you should never light it from the same angle as the camera, otherwise you will only get light bouncing straight back at you (depending on the angle of the object).

The trick here is to use a big light source and position it in the same opposite angle of your camera, in relation to the photographed object (behind it).

You can do this with a studio flash head and a big softbox, but there is a much simpler and cheaper way of doing it. You just need some white cardboard, a flash, and trigger system to fire it off-camera.

Here is how you can use this lighting setup:

The light from the flash bounced off the cardboard is a much bigger light source, allowing you to control the reflections on your image, creating gradients that shape the object, and avoiding specular highlights. Notice it also creates texture on the rock background.

This simple technique allows you to create a lot of different lighting effects in your image, depending on how you position your flash, and angle the cardboard in relation to the photographed object, which also creates texture on the background stone and water drops.

Here are some examples of light variations on this image with just some small adjustments to the cardboard positioning.

Knowing that light rays will always bounce from a reflective surface, at the same angle as that at which they strike it, makes it possible to determine the best positioning for the camera and the light source, taking into consideration the family of angles as you can see in the next diagram.

The light positioned within the family of angles will produce a direct reflection and the light outside of the family of angles will not light a mirror-like subject at all, from the camera’s point of view.

Even though the reflections on these images are not direct, but rather diffused reflections (which makes difficult to calculate the light angle as it is being bounced and dispersed in different directions) the family of angles can give you a good estimate of how to position your light in relation to the camera angle, in order to control the reflections in your image.