john lucas
I have a few minutes before my day of shooting begins so I decided I'd show you how the cooler thing works. You really don't need expensive equipment if you understand lighting. Mostly in this case it's just setting the white balance correctly, using a tripod, and adjusting the exposure. You may have to shade the lens so the light doesn't shine into it. Other than that I didn't do anything special.
All I did was cut the side and bottom out of a medium size cooler. (I keep these handy for shooting jewelry) I put the bowl in there and shined a standard cheapie desk lamp with a 75 watt standard incandescent bulb on the cooler. I move the light so it shined mostly on the front top corner. the bowl looked pretty good but the bottom was too dark so I used a white bounce card and picket up some of the direct light from the lamp and bounced it back into the bowl. It was too strong so I moved the card further back and bounce the same light back. Now it was balanced about right.
I had set the camera to tungsten white balance. The exposure was 8 seconds at f14. Looking at the photo closely I needed more depth of field. If I stopped down to f22 I would still probably not enough depth of field for the whole piece so I would shift the focus so the front rim and middle were sharp. In this photo the front rim is a little soft. The color is uncorrected. You may be able to see that it's very slightly yellow or almost green looking. that's because this light measures 2467K. The tungsten setting is for 3200 K so the light is a little yellow. Not bad for a 2 minute photo.

The next series is a smaller cooler with only the side cut out. I couldn't find one of my turned pens here in the office so I just shot my watch. Used the same light. there was just a touch of glare on the lens so I put a polarizer on the camera. My exposure was 18seconds at f 14. No other manipulations were added.