I have been back to the Pictish stone in a glass box a few times and tried different things. I still can’t get an image without reflections though.
Has anyone got one of these things, an anti-reflective lens hood (or equivalent, there are other makes). If so, is it any good?
I haven’t ever seen this. For $25 it’d be one of the cheaper photo accessories I’ve ever bought 
I have one aka, “the Plunger”. In practice it’s not as big, it is sold as a rubber lens hood. Large enough to shoot things behind glass displays in museums without having the wards take notice. Quite useful because: 1) it helps keep the camera steady (and about square) when you shoot in low light/long exposure, and 2) since you avoid reflections, you can forego the CPL filter that would reduce the light.
The advantage of a relatively small one is that it is less likely to cast an unwanted shadow.
About 10 bucks on ebay:
caveat It will not prevent reflections from the other glass panes.
A piece of cardboard painted matt black would also work, I reckon.
What I often do when photographing something behind glass is to move off centre until I find a spot where there are no reflections. I then square the image but up in DT using the rotate and perspective module.
As for a lens hood, I don’t expect it to do much for reflections, but on the other hand a polarising filter is made for the job.
You can take a piece of black card, cloth, or foam rubber, cut an X in the centre, and then tape, drape, or otherwise affix the corners to the glass around the object before popping your lens through the cut.
I had considered card. However, the stone is over a metre tall, so I would need to take multiple shots and then stitch them.
I managed to get an anti-reflective lens hood off eBay for £6 plus postage. Irritatingly, although I specified a UK site only, it is being sent from China.
Have you tried a polariser? I’m not sure how a lens hood will prevent the lens from capturing reflections on the glass itself…
Yep, tried a CPL without a great deal of luck.
The lens hood is effectively your piece of foam, but attached to the lens rather than being placed on the glass.
Different make, but similar to the one in the post by @cedric
I don’t see how that will overcome the need to stitch the photos - unless the hood is huge you’re still going to be inches from the glass, surely?
The idea of a card/cloth/whatever is that the glass is still reflective, but it’s only reflecting black. Unless the hood is pressed right up against the glass, non-black reflections will still occur.
Lens hoods that say they’re ‘anti-reflection’ are referring to the fact that the hood prevents light at sharp angles to the lens from entering and bouncing/reflecting around inside the lens barrel, which can reduce contrast. They don’t magically reduce reflections on objects the lens is looking at, unless that object is touching the lens hood and thus blocking those reflections completely.
I think that we may be talking at cross-purposes.
This is the Dunfallandy Cross. As you can see, it is within a narrow enclosure, with glass both back and front.
There should be no reflections from the stone, only the glass. Hopefully, the hood will stop these reflections.
I don’t see why it would, I’m afraid. Presumably you’re setting up your shot more or less square on. Therefore light causing reflections of things coming from more or less directly behind the camera are bouncing off the glass and straight into the camera. The hood will do nothing to stop those reflections - if it did, you would see the hood in your shot. Hoods only stop light rays coming in at sharp angles from the sides.
OK, well given that I have actually bought one of these hoods, then it is open to test. I will post the results once I have tried it.
Worth a try. A hood is a useful thing to have in general.
I think the only way you’ll eliminate noticeable reflections from a sheet of glass this big is to have a couple of helpers holding big black sheets of card or cloth either side of the camera, essentially making a giant hood that extends from the camera to the glass.
I did not know about this product, but it seems useful.
In situations where I had to improvise shoothing through glass (eg safari where I cannot open the car side windows) I improvised something similar from clothes (eg a rolled up dark T-shirt) but sometimes it would get in the way. A piece of rubber should be much better.
Indeed. My main concern is whether I will get reflections from the glass on the opposite side to the one on which I am taking pictures.
It looks to be quite a challenging object to shoot. I expect your best bet is to wait for a cloudy day to minimise bright light flying around causing highlights. Fortunately we rarely have to wait long for one of those in Scotland!
I had mentioned “obsessive” hadn’t I 
In some respects, it is a test case. We have been to a couple of lectures on Pictish statuary at the Perth art gallery recently, where it was argued that the Picts actually painted their stones and statues, much like the Greeks did. My wife then found a booklet called The Pictish Trail and thought it would an interesting idea to follow some of the trails. I would like to get some pictures, since the ones in books and websites on the subject are, to say the least, pretty naff.
OK, I got my silicone lens hood and took it to the stone. It works well, cutting the reflections completely. I had to use my 14-24mm lens, otherwise I would have to take a ridiculous number of images to get a complete view. As it is, I still had to take several images, since I was so close. This raised another problem, I can’t get the camera on a tripod up to the glass, so I had to hand-hold it.
I tried both Hugin and Xpano to stitch the images, the latter works the best. The bend in the resultant image is almost certainly due to hand-holding the camera with a fish-eye lens and not getting it absolutely horizontal.
As a fellow fisheye owner, handing holding it and trying to get straight lines is so brutal 
