[Canis Vulpes]

Now armed with a piece of black velvet I have had another attempt at product photography using skills and tips learned with Don Hoey in the reply above.

Setup
I spend nearly an hour setting the scene looking at different angles and compositions. As my velvet was just from the shop it needed cleaning and I found a handy tool shown in pic (1). This tool costs approx £3 from Sainsbury’s sewing isle and very handy for cleaning velvet before the shutter has been released, we have this tool as our cat likes to drop fur everywhere especially clothing. I have taken again to using Nikon Camera control as an easy way of reviewing images on a laptop rather than using the camera rear display or legwork (back to desktop PC). Composition was settled but only allowed approx 30cm working distance pic (2), this limited depth of view so some compromises had to be made. The 17-35 f2.8 I own has a minimum focus distance of around 25cm so I was forced to use this lens at 35mm for the picture.

Lighting
Over the course of this week I came up with a cunning plan to create a softbox using available equipment and with the brolly in shoot through (see above replies) I simply put the silver backing on the brolly in reverse to it reflects any lost light back to the subject pic (3). The brolly soft box as I shall refer it to allows only one light to be used as I needed another light to push life into the lenses of the CCTV cameras. Using camera control flash light and aperture compromise were set and I was happy with pic, stage 2 was to put life into lenses. Using ¼ power manual mode from a second flash unit I added some interest in the lenses but as they are convex aspherical lenses classic ‘life’ could not be put on to them even at full power from second flash. Anymore than ¼ power the overall exposure was affected to much. The amount of interest in the lenses is minimal but this is the nature of the lens not photography technique as the cause.

Please note for setup photographs various items were brought closer and were not positioned as photographed here.

Larger photo can be viewed in the gallery.
http://www.worldphotographyforum.com...6&limit=recent