john lucas
Here is the new process I'm working on to make shooting your work easier. I bought a 45 watt reflector light from Alzo. I think it was $20. I put it on a cheap lightstand. It is too broad of a light and hard to control so I built a grid out of cardboard tubing. I just used christmas wrapping paper tubes and cut them down to 2" and hot glued them together. I still need to find a way to lock it in the reflector. It sort of stays in there but falls out too easily.
I shined this light into a large 4 foot square panel. I used a smaller panel on the right to bounce light back into that side. These were made from PVC. I just used any white material that will transmit light. Some are white nylon, some are cotton.
I am lucky in my studio to have enough space to move the background quite far back. this makes it fairly easy to get the graduated background look.
This is a fairly reflective piece. Not glossy but a few steps up from satin so it would show a bad reflection if you used the reflector light without the panel.
I will show other ways to do vessels I get the lighting working.
These bulbs aren't very bright and are slightly off daylight color. You could easily correct the color in photoshop. I put a 10 magenta filter on so I would know what to tell people if they want dead on color. You will need a tripod which is a good idea anyway. The exposure at 200 ISO was 2 seconds at f11.