Specularity

In early 80s we were tasked with shooting an album for the Kremlin Armoury. Oh how we cared about not having uncontrolled specular highlights...We used cross-polarization on all the lights except a small guided one which produced a specular highlight exactly where we wanted it.

interesting will try when i get home. i tried a polarised filter on the shiny ribon on the doll and it didnt work.

Have you tried rotating the filter?

yep ,made no difference at all. i thought it would have

IMHO three possible reasons:
- filter assembled incorrectly
- wrong side of the filter
- metal in the ribbon.
First two are easy to rule out with a bucket of water, rotating the filter should change the visibility of an object on the bottom of the bucket.

Ok, thank you.

tried 3 filters today 1 a very high quality one and none of them worked in the studio they all worked out side on my windows but
not even on the glass eyes on the doll ,in fact they only darkened the image but couldnt vari the exposure at all using my led
continuous lighting.

It's not clear what you are doing. Guessing, you have the filter on the lens, you rotate it, and it doesn't remove specular reflections from the glass? Have you tried cross-polarization, that is putting a polarizing gel onto the light sources while keeping a polarizing filter on the lens?

Thanks, never knew anything about that process. If i was doing the kind of work you are I would buy the filter to go over my lights, but its very expencive
and drops light power by 4 stops using both. but thanks for the info.

Gels are used on the lights, and they are cheap.

It doesn't matter how long exposure is when nothing moves in the scene.

I added an example that shows some of the effects of the light source:

blog.kasson.com/the-last-word/specularity-part-2/