Guide / Tutorial Lighting cone - getting soft gradient lighting for taking pics of shiny coins

[Silverlocks]

I found the video below on the interwebs talking about using what the author calls a lighting cone to get lighting gradients on shiny objects.  So, I decided to try it out and knocked one up out of tracing paper - see below.   And here are a couple of coins I took some pics of as a test - Germania's Knights of the Past 2021 and 2016 Queen's Beasts Lion.  The Knights I arranged so some dark background reflected in the coin to emphasize its lustre.  The QB Lion was taken so gradient light through the cone showed over the entire surface of the coin, highlighting the device.

 

 

[Charliemouse]

You can, of course, buy photography diffusion paper, which has the advantage of being quite rugged (reusable) and has a neutral tone to avoid colour castes.  It's also not exactly expensive, at maybe £20 for more sheets than you'd need in a lifetime.  Baking parchment also works very well for diffusing light, and you may already have some in the kitchen, as a free alternative.

Using perfectly even diffuse light will help to avoid some nasty, problematic reflections.  But you need to be careful not to create flat images, where the highlights and shadows aren't there to provide depth queues.

 

 

 

Edited November 12, 2023 by Charliemouse

[Darr3nG]

Wonder how easy it would be to recreate something like this:

 

[Silverlocks]

9 minutes ago, Darr3nG said:

Wonder how easy it would be to recreate something like this:

 

Like this?