Well, I think the lighting has a lot to do with the camera you have, and whether you can adjust the lighting effects if you use incandescent bulbs.
I use a Sony camera for product shots. Yes, Canon's are better... for action shots. The reason I use Sony is because of how it handles low light. Sony's can shoot in the dark, and my camcorder actually DOES shoot in the dark with an infrared function, I can shoot things I can't see. Sony's are slow, not as good with color and clarity (good enough tho), but NO camera handles low light like Sony.
I don't want to set up a lightbox, and buy more junk. So my sophisticated setup consists of an old Sony Mavica (bought it new ages ago, but you can probably get one on Ebay for $100 or less), a $6 60-watt walmart clamp light over my computer desk. A piece of white printer paper.
I put the white paper on my mousepad and prop it on my table clock in back. I throw object on the paper, turn on the 60 watt bulb 1' away, and take a pix. There's no focusing or adjusting, just turn on the macro lens, point and shoot on automatic. The macro will take sharp images as small as 1/2".
The photos do come out yellower due to the lighting, so you have to correct the levels/contrast/brightness in photoshop (or whatever graphics program, any cheapo one will be able to do this), crop the image and I'm done. Takes a minute and costs very little.
This is what they look like (white paper, a white shirt background, a purple scarf background, a white towel background).
The soap pix I shot for a client who needed a pix for her site and didn't have any. I used her soap from our last swap
. Soap's nonreflective, but because it's bigger, I put it on my computer chair, got a white towel, threw it over the chair, and turned my clamp light on to the chair. Then point and shot. It's that easy, just get a Sony Mavica if you're lazy
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There is no other photo work done to the below images, other than color correction and cropping, that's what the Sony camera shoots.