For a personal project, I need to take a photo of a balloon. I want it illuminated, with back light and a front light. The thing here is that I don't know how to illuminate the front light. I want light without the flashes or light bulbs reflected on the surface of the balloon.
Any tips on how to illuminate it?
Unless you have a matt ballon which I never ever have seen, you will have a reflection.
The point is what reflection you can handle.
If you do not want a hotspot, use as Romero Ninov said a softbox. If you do not want a rectangle as a catchlight (which can be pretty nice) use a light tent.
Make a box of PVC pipes and construct the walls of vegetal paper (waxed paper is too transparent so do not use them) Make a round hole to sneak the camera lens into the tent.
Now uniformly lit the walls of the box. Probably two intense lights at 45° angles horizontally and vertically on both sides a little far away to make the light uniform.
What you will have is a biiiiiiiiiig catchlight, soo big that you will not see it is a catchlight.
One variation is making a conical tent, like a teepee, so the light is even more uniform.
Most of the balloon photo have kind of "catchlight" so there is nothing wrong. If you want to avoid those reflections try to use huge softbox to create big source of light and more even light.
Also covering the balloon with powder can help but you will loose the effect of glossy surface.
If the balloon's surface is uniform enough, you can simply remove the reflection in post-processing. As an example, here's a random photo of balloons:
And here are the same balloons with the reflections crudely removed in Lightroom. I'm sure you could do a much better job in Photoshop. Although do note that removing the reflections means that the balloons no longer look shiny.
