HOW TO PHOTOGRAPH REFLECTIVE, GLASS, AND TRANSPARENT PRODUCTS WITHOUT RUINING THE SHOT

There is a very specific kind of frustration that comes from photographing a reflective product.

You set up the shot. The product looks beautiful in real life, glass catching the light, metal gleaming, the liquid inside a rich, saturated colour. You take the photo. And what comes back is a muddy, hazy image full of unwanted reflections, blown-out highlights, and a product that somehow looks cheaper in the photograph than it did before you started.

This is not a skill failure. It is a physics problem. Reflective surfaces, glass, polished metal, transparent packaging, chrome finishes, watch crystals, anything that behaves like a mirror, do not absorb light the way most products do. They reflect it. And what they reflect is the entire environment around them, including things you never intended to put in the frame.

Managing that reflection is a technical discipline. It takes specific tools, specific techniques, and a way of thinking about the shoot that is fundamentally different from photographing a matte product on a white background.

I sat down with Ibrahim Doodhwala to go through this properly. Not the surface-level tips. The actual mechanics of what goes wrong, why it goes wrong, and what professionals do about it that most DIY setups cannot replicate.

Shreya: Let's start with something most brand owners don't think about. Beyond jewellery and perfume, which we covered in a previous post, what other products in the UAE market are technically difficult to photograph for the same reflective reasons, and do brands realise it?

Ibrahim: Most do not realise it until they have the images back and wonder why they look so different from what they expected. The obvious ones are watches, which have metal cases, glass crystals, and often a reflective dial surface all in one object. Then electronics: laptops, phones, tablets, any product with a screen. The screen is a mirror. Anything you put in front of it is going to show up in it. Polished packaging is another one, boxes and bottles with high-gloss finishes, foil printing, metallic labels. Sunglasses. Anything with a shiny surface, whether it is the lens or the frame. Even some food packaging falls into this category: foil pouches, shiny wrappers, metallic tins. The brand has paid serious money for that premium finish and then is confused when the photograph makes it look cheap and flat.

Shreya: What makes it look cheap specifically?

Ibrahim: Haze and uncontrolled reflection. When you photograph a reflective product in a normal environment with normal lighting, what happens is that the light bounces everywhere. Off the walls, the ceiling, the table, the camera, your clothes, all of it reflects back into the product and creates a haze. That milky, diffused glow that sits over the product and obscures the actual detail of what you are trying to show. The product stops looking crisp and starts looking foggy. And a foggy image of a premium product looks like a cheap image of a cheap product, regardless of what the product actually is.

Haze is the enemy of reflective product photography. It is caused by light bouncing uncontrolled around the shooting environment. Controlling it is the entire job.

The Three Things Going Wrong When You Shoot Glass on Your Phone

Shreya: When someone is photographing a glass or transparent product on their phone at home and everything looks wrong, what are the specific problems they cannot see until they look at the image?

Ibrahim: Three things, almost every time. First, the camera is visible in the product. A phone held in front of a bottle or a watch is going to appear in the reflection. The customer sees the phone, sometimes the hand holding it, sometimes the room behind it. That is the entire environment that the brand was trying to hide now visible inside the product itself. Second, the light is coming from the wrong direction. Most people light from above or from the front because that is where their ceiling lights and windows are. For food, front and back lighting makes sense because you want the food itself to glow. For reflective products, especially luxury ones like jewellery and perfume, you need top light. A dedicated light from above that gives the product its own shine, like it is generating its own glow. Front lighting on a reflective product just creates flat reflection. Top lighting creates the impression of royalty, of something that has its own light source.

Shreya: And the third problem?

Ibrahim: The haze. Which comes from not controlling where the light goes after it leaves the source. In a home setup, the light from your window or your lamp bounces off every surface in the room and some of that bounced light lands on your reflective product and sits there as a milky layer over the image. You cannot see this haze in real life because your eyes adjust and filter it. The camera records everything, including the haze.

The Black Card: The Simplest Tool Nobody Uses

Shreya: If someone is shooting at home and cannot afford professional equipment, what is the most practical thing they can do to reduce that haze?

Ibrahim: Black cards. Small pieces of black card or black foam board positioned around the setup, specifically opposite the light source. Think about it like an audio recording room. When you record sound in a professional studio, the walls are covered in foam shapes that absorb the sound waves and stop them bouncing around the room creating echo. Black cards do exactly the same thing for light. They absorb the light that would otherwise bounce around the space and create haze, and they stop it from reflecting back into the product.

Shreya: Where exactly do you put them?

Ibrahim: Wherever the light is not supposed to go. If you have a light source on the right side of your product, a black card on the left absorbs the spill from that light and stops it creating a reflection in the product from the left side. If you have a light above, black cards on the sides prevent the light from spilling sideways and bouncing back. You are essentially building a controlled tunnel of light that only reaches the product from the direction you want. Small pieces of black card from any craft shop. They do not need to be large or expensive. They just need to be placed with intention.

Black cards absorb light the way foam absorbs sound in a recording studio. They stop unwanted light from bouncing around the set and creating haze in your reflective product. This is the single most effective low-cost technique for improving DIY reflective product photography.

Photo Stacking: The Technique That Changes Everything for Close-Up Work

Shreya: You mentioned photo stacking as critical for jewellery and perfume photography. Most brand owners have never heard of this. What is it and why does it matter so much?

Ibrahim: Try this right now. Hold your hand up in front of your face, fingers spread. Now bring it as close to your eyes as possible while still trying to focus on your fingertips. You will notice that as your hand gets very close, different parts of it go in and out of focus. The tip of one finger might be sharp while the knuckle behind it is blurred. The closer you get to any subject, the smaller the zone of focus becomes. This is physics. It happens with lenses exactly the same way it happens with your eyes.

Ibrahim: Now imagine you are photographing a ring. A small ring, maybe two centimetres wide, with diamonds set in a gold band. To show the detail in those diamonds, in the individual facets, in the engraving on the band, in the setting itself, you have to get very close. But when you get that close, the depth of field collapses. You can get one part of the ring sharp. The rest goes soft. In a single image, you can never have the entire ring in sharp focus at macro distance.

Shreya: So what do you do?

Ibrahim: You take multiple photographs, each focused on a different part of the ring. Maybe the front face of the stone in one shot. The edge of the band in another. The side profile of the setting in a third. Each image is taken at the same angle and position, only the focus plane shifts. Then in Photoshop you combine all of those images, taking the sharp parts from each and blending them into one composite photograph where everything, the stone, the band, the setting, every detail, is in sharp focus simultaneously. This is photo stacking. For a small ring with significant detail, we might do this process twelve times, fifteen times, sometimes twenty-nine separate images combined into one final photograph.

Shreya: And this is not possible with a phone camera?

Ibrahim: The phone camera cannot control the focus plane precisely enough for macro jewellery work. And even if it could, you would need a stable tripod setup where the camera does not move even a fraction of a millimetre between shots, because the entire technique depends on every image being from exactly the same position and angle. This is why jewellery photography is one of the categories where I always recommend professional equipment, not because phones are bad cameras, but because the technique requires things phone setups cannot provide.

The Holy Grail Moment: What Good Light Looks and Feels Like

Shreya: Is there a specific moment in a reflective product shoot where you know you have got it right? What does that look like?

Ibrahim: Yes. And it is very distinct. When the light is wrong, the product looks like an object sitting in a space. It is present. It is visible. But it has no authority. It is just there.

Ibrahim: When the light is right for a luxury reflective product, jewellery, perfume, a watch, the product stops looking like it is sitting somewhere and starts looking like it is calling to you. There is a quality of self-illumination about it, as if the product itself is generating the light rather than reflecting it from an external source. The gold looks warm in a way that reads as precious rather than shiny. The stone has depth. The glass bottle has a glow from inside. It is the feeling that you are holding something that deserves to be held. Not a product. An object of genuine quality. That is what we are building toward with every light adjustment, every card placement, every angle shift. That moment when the product starts to feel like it has its own importance in the frame. Like a holy grail sitting there waiting for you to reach for it.

Shreya: How do you know when you have reached it?

Ibrahim: You look at the back of the camera and you stop adjusting. Before that moment you are always seeing something that could be better. The reflection is slightly off. The haze is still there. The shadow is going the wrong way. And then suddenly all of those things resolve at once and the image on the back of the camera looks like what the product deserves to look like. That is when you stop adjusting and start shooting.

The product should look like it is generating its own light. Not like it is sitting under a light. That feeling of self-illumination is the goal of every reflective product shoot, and it is what separates photography that sells luxury from photography that merely documents it.

The Hard Ceiling: Where DIY Stops Working

Shreya: Where exactly is the point where no amount of effort or technique is going to produce a usable image without professional equipment?

Ibrahim: The hard ceiling for DIY on reflective products is zoom distance. This is the thing that limits almost every home setup regardless of how good the phone camera is or how carefully the black cards are placed. To show the detail that makes a jewellery piece worth buying, you have to get close enough that the detail is actually visible. The individual diamonds in a setting. The texture of a woven gold chain. The engraving on a ring band. At the distance a phone camera can achieve without specialist lenses, these details are either blurred, too small to read, or both.

Ibrahim: Professional jewellery and close-up product photography uses dedicated macro lenses that can focus at very short distances and still maintain the resolution to capture fine detail. Combined with photo stacking, which requires both the macro lens and a tripod stable enough that twenty-nine sequential shots align perfectly, this is equipment that a DIY setup simply cannot replicate. The phone camera hits its optical limits before you get close enough to show what the product actually is.

Shreya: What about for perfume specifically?

Ibrahim: For perfume the ceiling is light control. You can get close enough to a perfume bottle with a phone. The issue is that to make a perfume bottle look the way it should look, premium, luminous, the glass glowing, the liquid inside rich and saturated, you need to be able to place light with precision in multiple directions simultaneously and control what each light source does and does not illuminate. A window and a ring light cannot do this. You end up with either flat even light that kills the depth, or strong single-direction light that creates uncontrolled reflections across the whole bottle. Professional studio lighting with modifiers, cutters, flags, and the ability to feather each light precisely is the difference between a perfume bottle that looks like a commodity and one that looks like a luxury product.

Shreya: So for brand owners trying to decide whether to DIY or hire, where is the honest line?

Ibrahim: If your product is reflective and your brand positioning is premium or luxury, hire a professional. Not because DIY is impossible, but because the gap between what a DIY setup can produce and what professional equipment and technique can produce is largest in this category. For a mobile case or a t-shirt, the DIY ceiling is high enough that early-stage brands can produce acceptable content themselves. For a jewellery brand or a perfume brand, the DIY ceiling falls below the visual standard the customer expects before they feel confident spending money on a luxury purchase.

What This Means for UAE Brands in Practice

The UAE market for reflective product categories, jewellery, perfume, watches, premium electronics, luxury packaging, is one of the most demanding visual environments in the world. The customer shopping for a gold ring on Noon or a luxury fragrance on Instagram has seen Cartier campaigns and Chanel photography. Their visual reference for what these products should look like is world class.

Closing the gap between that reference and what a small or mid-sized UAE brand can produce is a real challenge. But it is not an impossible one. The techniques are learnable. The equipment is available. The approach, controlling what the product sees and reflects, managing haze with black cards, lighting for self-illumination rather than flat coverage, understanding photo stacking for macro work, is a body of knowledge that any photographer can develop with time and practice.

What it is not is something that happens automatically with a good phone camera and natural light. Reflective products require deliberate technique. Every time.

Product Type	Main Challenge	DIY Feasible?	Key Professional Tool
Jewellery with gemstones	Macro detail, focus depth	No	Macro lens + photo stacking
Perfume bottles (glass + metal)	Multi-surface reflection control	Difficult	Studio lighting with modifiers
Watches	Crystal reflection, dial detail	No	Polarising filter + macro lens
Transparent packaging	Haze, internal visibility	Partially	Black cards + controlled light
Polished electronics (screens)	Screen reflection, fingerprints	Partially	Cross-polarisation technique
Foil and metallic packaging	Specular highlights, colour shift	Partially	Diffused large light source
Sunglasses (lenses)	Lens reflection, frame detail	Difficult	Light tent or controlled studio

If you have a reflective product and the photography is not doing it justice, this is exactly the kind of brief we take seriously. Reach Ibrahim on Instagram at @ibrahim_food_photographer or see the full range of product photography Dubai and UAE brands trust at spinthirasmedia.com.