B&W Glass Objects

[Mike Buckley]

Excellent points about dust and scratches, Manfred.

My makeshift studio is within a small storage room which has one entrance and that's a door leading to the outside. The stuff in the room has been stored there mostly since 1985 on open shelves on most of the ceiling and all but one wall. So, dust is simply an inevitable fact of life. I clean the tabletop and the subjects before composing the image but dust settles on them during the shoot. The only practical solution in this situation is to deal with it during post-processing; I methodically scour every part of every image at 67% viewing size.

Most of the glass that I shoot has lots of imperfections. I often actually don't know whether a particular spot is an imperfection in the glass or a speck of dust. Regardless, I zap it.

As for the acrylic being so easy to scratch, I'm a complete and total klutz. I have scratched my clear glass, mirror and acrylic tabletops. Depending on the lighting, the scratches may or may not be evident. If they are, I take that into account when composing the image and get rid of the scratches during post-processing. I'll eventually have to replace a tabletop or two once I scratch them too often.

Those solutions aren't ideal parts of a workflow but my makeshift studio is the farthest thing from an ideal situation. I make the best of what I've got, which in this case means dealing with some stuff during post-processing.

[Manfred M]

Thanks Mike - I had rather hoped you had discovered some secret to overcome this problem; but I guess not. Brute force PP it is.

I once got a nice cast off piece of polycarbonate (Lexan) and it was quite scratch resistance, but the dust was still an issue, but I could damp wipe it without scratcing it. The only problem with the polycarbonate is that the material is super expensive.

[Mike Buckley]

Terry mentioned the lack of separation in my last photo between the tops of the subjects and the background and I mentioned that that might be inevitable to a small amount when using this method of photography explained in Light: Science and Magic. Indeed, it's evident to me in some of the example photos in the book, though to a lesser extent than in my photo.

So, I decided to review the book and came upon this very revealing sentence that introduces the dark-field and bright-field methods that the authors explain: "We can avoid almost all of the problems associated with edge definition by using one of two basic lighting arrangements." (The italic font is provided by me, not the authors, for emphasis.) Interestingly, there is no discussion that attends to avoiding all of those problems.

This entire discussion has really been helpful to me. I'm now motivated to go beyond the basics discussed in the book and to experiment with variations. Heck, the authors explicitly explain that that is exactly what they want me to do. I think I might even understand the basics well enough in both theory and practice that I've progressed beyond the stage of having just enough knowledge to be dangerous. Nah, probably not.

[Loose Canon]

Good luck with the dentist Mike! I usually succumb under the torture and tell them where the treasure is buried!

So hypothetically speaking, what if you were to hang a piece of white foam board horizontally above the glass just out of the frame?

In this composition you might have to cut a piece in a kind of triangular or “boomerang” shape (to match the rims in your composition) and size and place it such that it just lines up with the top rims. Maybe set a piece on the top of the group and kind of trace the rim lines.

I am thinking that if it were too big and extended past the rim over the “body” of the glass pieces it might throw unwanted reflections into the “body”.

It may be more trouble than it’s worth, but that would be the way I would go about if I wanted to see if it would work. Theoretically, I am hypothesizing that the rims would reflect the white and appear to light up!