I never mastered the art of indirect lighting. I failed all my attempts at building small "tents" (white rooms) - to obtain diffused lighting and avoid the annoying reflections on shiny surfaces, and I concluded that I was missing two things: skill and suitable equipment. Today, 27 February 2016, I decided that this photo, a rare Olive donated by a friend of mine, would have been my last disappointment.

After some attempts, I found a convincing setup: before introducing to you some test pictures, I'll explain how I did. I started with the reflected and transmitted light illuminators (the latter ensures that no shadows are cast by the subject) that I use for my microscope, a cylinder of reflecting metal paper ("rollable mirror"), a disc made with Bristol cardboard.

Attenzione: pur usando lo scatto temporizzato o il telecomando, l'otturatore ha abbastanza inerzia da scuotere leggermente il mio piccolo stand. Se non disponete di un pesante stand professionale, la sola soluzione è usare una sensibilità ISO maggiore, ed una maggiuore apertura, il che sfortunatamente va a scapito della profondità di campo e della nitidezza.

The fully assembled stand - as long as the camera was mounted on the stand, I took these two ugly pictures with my webcam.

Warning: even when using timer or remote control, the shutter has enough momentum to shake my small stand slightly. Unless you have an heavy, professional stand at hand, the only solution is to use an higher ISO setting and a large aperture, which unfortunately are detrimental to depth of field and crispness.

Here is a better picture of my "cage of light" (click on the picture to enlarge).

Here are the components on the baseboard of the stand (click on the picture to enlarge). The traslucent plastic disk was meant as a diffuser when the annular illuminator was mounted on the objective, in this setup only a slight difference can be observed whether it's mounted above or below the white cardboard (click on the picture to enlarge).

The only notable intuition was placing the ring illuminator on the transmitted lighting, facing upwards upwards (click on the picture to enlarge).

The reflective cylinder surrounds the ring illuminator for an heigth of around 5 cm.

The size of the hole must be adapted to the objective's specifications. Obviously, the maximum linear dimension of the subject must not exceed the diameter of the transmitted light illuminator (in this case, 7 cm) (click on the picture to enlarge).

ATTENTION: I introduce the photos that follow not because they are beautiful (on the contrary, focus is imperfect, subjects weren't prepared, dust can be easily detected...), but only because we are dealing with extremely shiny and reflective objects. For the first time in my life, I don't see reflections but the steady and diffused illumination that I always strived to obtain.

To take pictures with a dark background, being disappointed by the results obtained with a classic darkfield condenser for stereo microscope, such as the one illustrated above, made to be positioned above the transmitted ligh illuminator, I built a small stand as pictured below, and I set up the lighting as illustrated above, with just the ring illuminator pointiung upwards.