The two answers, which disagree
- Polarise. One approach, described as standard commercial practice for watches and jewellery, puts a polarising filter on the camera and often on the light too, then adjusts flash power and exposure to pay for the light the filters absorb.
- Control the light instead. A former still-life photographer said they never polarised anything, and worked entirely with a large collection of diffusing and reflecting materials to shine through and bounce off, with the lights themselves kept plain.
- Both are commercial photographers describing what worked in their own studios, and the thread did not resolve which is right.
The constraint that governs both
The reply that makes the disagreement navigable: if the light arrives from the direction of the camera, no polariser will remove the reflection, because polarisers are effective when the light hits the subject at around ninety degrees to the lens axis. The practical instruction was to put the light out at roughly forty-five degrees. Whichever approach is taken, a flash pointed straight at a shiny subject from the camera position is the hardest possible starting point.
Making the source bigger
- Bounce it. Aim the flash up, to the side, or behind into white paper or a wall, which was described as substantially increasing the size of the source relative to the subject.
- A larger source spreads the reflection out instead of leaving a hard bright spot, which is the same result the polarising route reaches by a different means.
- The small clip-on plastic diffuser was rated better than nothing and not much more, and was described as not being what the tool is for.
- Dulling spray came up as an occasional studio measure for softening a hard reflection, used rarely.
The order of operations
The most transferable line in the thread was about sequence rather than equipment: fix the object and the camera into a composition that gives the shape you want first, and only then start working on the light. And on fixing it afterwards — removing a reflection in post was called rough, achievable only through careful dodging, burning and cloning, which makes it the last resort rather than the plan.