We describe a technique for surface recovery of a rotating object illuminated under a collinear light source (where the light source lies on or near the optical axis). We show that the surface reflectance function can be directly estimated from the image sequence without any assumption on the reflectance property of the object surface. From the image sequence, the 3D locations of some singular surface points are calculated and their brightness values are extracted for the estimation of the reflectance function. We also show that the surface can be recovered by using shading information in two images of the rotating object. Iteratively using the first-order Taylor series approximation and the estimated reflectance function, the depth and orientation of the surface can be recovered simultaneously. The experimental results on real image sequences of both matte and specular surfaces demonstrate that the technique is feasible and robust.