Working with tabletop photography presents its own set of challenges. It seems that the smaller the product the smaller the light modifiers seem to get. Specially when you are looking to highlight just a small, specific area of the product. Then there are the multitude of reflective and refractive surfaces that can cause any sane person to pull their hair out. When you start crowding all this onto a small table you have to be careful not to cause a domino effect of destruction. When dealing with bounce cards (a favorite solution for a great many issues) the problem becomes how to support the cards without taking up a lot of valuable table real estate. One solution I found is the use of a simple DIY holder made from discarded 2x4 pine studs. You can see them in use in this photo (circled red) holding up some black and white foam core bounce cards.

For a while I have been wanting to do some studio setups that play with elements; water, fire, earth, air. An opportunity to play with fire came up and this is the results of that photo shoot. As you can see it is pretty impressive but when I describe the behind the scene setup you will be amazed at how simple this setup really is. It is so simple, in fact, that the image at right was all done in-camera. While the watch looks like it is on fire, the flames actually sit a few inches behind the watch. No watches were injured in the making of this tutorial.