Foolin around with some stuff at home. I think this is the best shot I took just because of the simplicity of it. What do you think? Andrew

Looks like a clean product shot... Want to tell us what the light set up was? And did you run and unsharp mask on this after converting to JPEG? It looks just a tiny whisker soft.

The light setup was just daylight on a plain white piece of foam-core. I don't like to use post work on my stuff unless it is contrast or hue adjustment or maybe to remove dust. If it looks soft here it is because I used a +3 enlargement filter on my lens which gives a very shallow depth of field, hence making most of the apple out of focus. Oh geez! There go all my secrets! -Andrew

Alpha: Are you suggesting unsharp AFTER .JPG-conversion? My advice to many has been "don't do ANYTHING after JPG'ing -- especially unsharp!" (well, now that I think about it, I guess increasing saturation or shifting the hue afterward is even WORSE) I also remind'm not to use too big of a 'radius' number for unsharp -- I most often use .67, even on a fairly large image (maybe up to 800X600, I mean). I see brazen over-use of unsharp all over the place these days (catalogs and newspapers and such), but on the same token, I think a descrete amount is MANDATORY after resampling. APF: That's a beautiful subject for the study, but I think it needs more depth of field, whatever it takes -- I mean these view camera freaks (I wish I were one) are running f/32 all the time, and taking, like, eighteen second exposures! Merry Christmas!

I would have sworn that this would have turned out to be a very interesting thread. We got studio still life art photography, depth of field control, lossy compression, post production techniques.. This is some important stuff!

Some people have no respect for the finer things in life, huh, Finder?!

This is some important stuff. It's what I've been trying to work out in my own photography. Here is my first reasonable attempt at a composed still life (on the dinner table) I just took it a few weeks ago..

Very nice still-life, Finder. I'm guessing the downward angle was done to remove your reflection from the coffee mug. None the less, it is an interesting composition. It's almost abstract compositionally. It speaks volumes to me since it relates to a typical meal I might eat. Good job! Here's the first still-life I did. You can see I was still trying to grasp the depth-of-firld concept but I was still proud of it. It really got me interested in still-life photography and photography in general...