First shot in home-made light tent

[RecurrentNerve]

I decided to make a DIY light tent out of a cardboard box and silicon baking paper. Lit with my extremely professional, high-spec 40W bedside lamp from the right, tweaked in Photoshop afterwards. I made the model myself, incidentally.

Any tips for this kind of shooting, bearing in mind I only have the 18-55mm kit lens on my D5000 to work with?

2.5 sec
f 14
ISO 500
Focal Length 46mm

[LeeR]

Years ago we used to do something called 'psyching the background,' that is we would take a sheet of laminate that served as the surface for products shots, then we would bend it up in the back so that it also served as background with no seems in between. Now, with a light tent, we don't need to do that any more. However, if we don't leave some clues behind our images look like things floating in some sort of weird white space. To keep that from happening I like to do two things; 1) I like to leave as much of the natural shadow as possible, and 2) I copy the shadow color and use it to apply a gentle gradient to the background, thus duplicating the look of the old 'psyched backgrounds.' The result is subtle but produces an image that appears to exist in real space.

[RecurrentNerve]

Interesting. There is actually more shadow in the original shot but I levelled it out in Photoshop. I'll retweak. Thanks.