Witch's hat

Due to some interest I wanted to share one of the lighting setups for shooting the shiny pieces. I started out with shooting a shiny flat surface, thinking it would be the easiest. Shown here is a lighting tent that had been purchased several years ago. It has translucent material with a velcroed slit up and down for the camera lens to poke through. Shooting highly reflective surfaces is difficult and requires wrap around lighting. Wherever there is not light on the shiny surface, it goes black. The lighting worked out pretty well but all the wrinkles in the lighting tent showed up! I did not want to iron it so I changed to another setup. I took white studio background paper and placed it directly above the shiny flat surface so the reflection on the surface was that of white paper, not fabric. I was not able to shoot directly overhead (figuring they did not want a self portrait of me) but had to angle my position a little. Then, using Photoshop, I corrected the keystone distortion and made the game board look perfectly square again. You never see an image printed somewhere that has not been corrected or enhanced in some way. It is estimated that now photographers spend 20% of their time shooting and 80% of their time performing retouching on a computer. We live in a world of illusions.