Basic setup for photographing glass?

That looks very slick, indeed! I might get there eventually.

Last summer I went through a shallow focus phase - now I think I'm entering a dark background phase. I'll probably send back the barn door attachment and just keep using my arm or fabricate something with cardboard or foam-core to manually shade out the backgrounds. I am hip to plexi, BTW - I often like to use white with the paperweights.



Getting Snooty

Funny, I don't always get the sun star effect (may have something to do with alignment between camera & source - will have to experiment more).

One danger I see now is to avoid getting too carried away. Even before all this I was struggling to make my work look its best without creating unrealistic expectations. (I had a couple of customers last year complain and/or return, felt like they were mislead by my photos...)

But overall, it is very clear that a Fresnel light was absolutely the right call! Here's a couple of frames made with just the light without any modifiers.



Fresnel light set on "spot" (L) and "flood" (R)

The focusing action alone can have a pretty significant impact!