In principle, the best and simplest way to take high-qualitiy shots is described by Alfred Klomp. He takes his pictures outside at a cloudy day using the ambient light as a perfectly diffuse white-light source. I attemped to do so as well, but I failed since I lack an important prerequisite for this method - I don't live in Holland so I cannot be sure that the required gray weather comes up within some days.

Hence I resorted to my basement where I have built up the primitive set-up shown in the image. The camera to be photographed is placed on the white back side of a poster which is taped to the wall. I use two big white cardboards as reflectors on both sides of the stage. There is only one light source, a 500 W halogen lamp from a hardware store, which is pointing against the white ceiling. The object is only illuminated indirectly and all the reflectors around essentially remove all shadows.

I took all the pictures with a borrowed Sony digital camera at medium-telephoto setting of the zoom at distances around about 40 cm. Usually, I overexpose by 0.3 to 0.7 stops (depending, e.g. on the color of the camera) to get a perfectly homogeneous white background. An important point is to make a proper white balance before taking pictures.

It is always necessary to do some subsequent image processing on the pictures. Firstly I correct the color balance, since the digital camera's white balance is never perfect. Then, if necessary I adjust brightness and contrast. I always do a gamma correction by a factor of 1.1 to 1.3. This gives the metallic parts a nice shiny appearance. Finally I rotate (if necessary due to camera misalignment) and crop the image, resize to a width of 400 pixels, and do a final unsharp masking step.