[Mike Jordan]

If you are getting glare, you either have to bright of lights, they are too close or both. The idea with a light tent is that the tent will spread out the light. If you put the light right up against it (so as to get more light inside) then the walls of the tent don't have a chance to do their job... which is to spread out and defuse the light.

Try backing the lights away a foot and try again. You can also add another layer of material and the light, which gives a chance for the first layer to defuse and spread and then that light is defused and spread again when it hits your light tent. This will reduce the amount of light hitting your object since light is also being bounced away each time it hits something, so you will need to compensate for that.

Another option is to put the lights inside the tent and aim them towards the wall away from the object. Most of the light will go out but some will bounce back giving a nice defused light. What I use to like doing was using a large sheet of white cardboard or foamboard and put it around what I was photographing. Then I would aim my lights at the reflective side of the cardboard and reflect the light back onto my posing table. I used a couple of the 4x8' white insulation panels you can get at Home Depot once, but those start to crumble after awhile and you can't bend them (although you can cut them and then put strips of masking tap across the cut to make a hinge to bend it). My favorite though is going to a box making factory or supplier of cardboard and buying the large sheets of white cardboard. The size I usually got was 5'x10', a size that lets me wrap it almost completely around something. They only cost a few dollars each too and last quit a while. Of course I was shooting bigger things than some of the jewelry that people here shoot so smaller sheets would probably be better. Or art board would work as well. If you get both white and black you can use the black in places where you don't want light bounced back.

Mike