Silver, glass and polished furniture are the three subjects that separate catalogue photographers who understand light from those who own a softbox. A mahogany chest photographs fine under almost anything. A Georgian teapot doesn't. The trouble isn't brightness, it's that every polished surface in the frame carries a picture of your lighting setup, and the viewer sees your studio before they see the object.
The good news: reflection control is geometry, not expensive equipment. Once you know where reflections come from, you can shoot silver with two lights and a sheet of black card.
The one rule that governs everything
A mirror-like surface can only show you what lies in its "family of angles": the patch of space from which light bounces off the surface into the lens. Change the angle between camera, subject and light and you change which part of the room appears painted onto the silver. that's the entire craft. A softbox aimed at the subject at forty-five degrees will appear as a hard-edged white window in the side of a teapot. Move the softbox closer and the reflection grows and its edges soften. Nothing about the softbox changed; only the geometry did.
Practical upshot for catalogue work: you light polished objects by deciding what you want reflected in them, then placing that thing where the family of angles demands. For silver, the classic answer is a graduated white-to-grey field: large, close, soft, so the object reads as smoothly modelled metal rather than a mirror with a handle.
Silver: tents, strips and the black card trick
For dealer and auction catalogue work on flatware, candlesticks and teaware, three tools do ninety percent of the work.
A light tent gives you an even wrap of soft light and kills most room reflections, which matters in a crowded saleroom or a dealer's back room where you can't control the walls. The cost of a tent is that it flattens the subject: everything reflects white, and the object loses its form. The fix is to cut the light. Hang strips of black card inside the tent, or clamp black paper along the sides, so the object picks up deliberate dark lines. Those black reflections are what make the metal read as rounded. Without them a goblet looks like paper.
Strip boxes with a black side panel work the same way in an open room. Two soft lights from behind and to the sides, black cards to camera-left and camera-right close in to the object, and a small fill over the top. The black cards reflect as the dark contours; the strips give the highlights along the rims.
Watch the sign. On silver it's usually on the underside or the stem, small, stamped into the metal. It sells the piece. Shoot it with a raking low light so the stamping casts a shadow, straight on with a small diffused source, and if your dealer client needs it for records, do it as a separate tight frame with a macro lens or close-up attachment. An overexposed white highlight hides the assay marks as effectively as cropping them out.
Glass: light the edges, not the surface
Glass is the opposite problem. You don't want to light the surface at all; you want the glass to catch light on its edges and stay dark in the middle. Two standard setups:
The bright-field setup puts a large translucent white behind the glass and lights the background, not the object. The glass picks up dark edge lines against the bright field, defined by refraction. Camera on axis, background one to two stops brighter than the fill on the front. This is the classic catalogue treatment for drinking glasses and decanters: shape reads at a glance, no distracting internal reflections.
The dark-field setup reverses it: a black background with a strip of light behind the object, often just a narrow softbox edge visible past black card. The glass now glows along its outline while the body stays dark, and stems and rims pick up bright lines. Decanters and cut glass photograph beautifully this way, but it's moodier than most catalogues want. Keep it for the website hero and use bright-field for the inventory pages.
Either way, the working rule: never put a light in front of glass aimed at it. The reflection is unmanageable and the glass vanishes.
One more glass discipline: dust and fibre control. A single small fibre inside a decanter shows as a black worm against the bright field at catalogue reproduction sizes. Rinse, dry, and blow out (a hand blower, not compressed air) immediately before the frame. Lens cloth the exterior after handling, since fingerprints read as smears.
Polish and patina: what to leave alone
The temptation with tarnished stock is to polish before photographing. For insurance and sale catalogues, don't. Polishing changes the object, and on antique silver it can remove the hallmarks' sharpness along with the patina that authenticates age. Shoot the tarnish. it's honest, and in the trade it's expected. If a client insists on bright silver, recommend a professional conservator and say so in the paperwork, because aggressive polishing is a value-reduction event and no dealer needs that argument later.
The same principle forbids the studio shortcut of dulling spray on the object. On props and new product work, dulling spray kills reflections quickly. On antiques it's contamination, sometimes irreversible, and no reputable practice puts it on a period object. Control reflections with geometry and flags instead.
Camera-side settings that matter
- Light from the side or behind the family of angles, never from the camera position for glass.
- f/11 to f/16 on a 100mm-ish macro or short telephoto: catalogue work needs edge-to-edge depth on small objects, and diffraction at these magnifications is a fair trade for form.
- Focus stack only when the piece needs it, e.g., a tall jug where the sign plane and the rim must both be sharp, and your dealer wants one image rather than two. Otherwise shoot detail frames separately.
- Polarise carefully. A polariser kills specular glare off wood varnish and paint, and can knock down stray room reflections on silver, but it won't remove the main studio reflections you placed on purpose. Test with and without on the first object of the day.
- Shoot tethered or at minimum with magnified live view. Reflections hide at screen size and appear at print size. If you can see the photographer in the teapot, the client can too, and at full page width a black coat sleeve across a coffee pot is an expensive retouch.
The workflow that keeps it fast
Catalogue sessions run to dozens of objects, so fix the setup and vary the subject. One camera position, one lighting set for silver, one for glass, black and white cards on stand-offs to shift the reflections per object. Ten minutes per object is realistic once the set is dialled, and consistency across a catalogue page is itself a mark of professionalism that buyers register without articulating.
Silver and glass reward planning and punish improvisation. Decide what you want reflected, place it there, and keep the camera out of the family of angles. The rest is dusting and patience.
Chris Challis is a second-generation commercial photographer in Warwickshire, twenty-five years in antiques and fine-art work. This article sits in the studio journal alongside briefing a commercial photographer and copyright and licensing in commercial photography. For catalogue, insurance and dealer commissions, get in touch through the contact page.