You should tell us what type of lighting you wanted to achieve and with what gear, so we may tell if you managed to do it.

Like mentioned already, getting the right amount of light in the shadows can be tricky, even more so with reflective subjects, but that’s just a matter of experimentation. You may also want to consider what matters the most to you between shutter speed and noise/sharpness? With that kind of picture, I doubt you need to focus that much on shutter speed, so you may consider lowering lower your ISO and use a much longer exposure (less noise in the image, for the same amount of light). That being said, it looks like you’re on a promising path :)

Silly suggestion: if you can’t hide it, have you tried using the sewing thingy (sorry, I don’t know the English word) that’s visible on the fabric as a legit part of your composition? It could help drive the viewer’s attention exactly where you want them to look.

Is this with a flash or with continuous lighting? The reason I ask is that I do product photography for my wife’s business and I found it much easier to do with flash. There are a couple benefits I found:

• There is just a ton more light to play with. This lets you stop down the aperture and increase the depth of field in your shot. Looking closely at your shot, the front of the spyglass and the rear of the cases are out of focus, something that you could fix by stopping down to 8.0 or so (where I do most of my photography these days).
• Related to above, the extra light lets you shoot at a lower ISO. Your shot has lots of noise in it which tells me that the ISO is pretty high. I typically shoot at 200 or so, something that would be impossible without the all the light from a flash. Also note that this could be due to compression that happened when it was uploaded to lemmy, so if you don’t see this in your version, then you can disregard.

I think you have done a great job with what I find to be the hardest part of product photography, the composition. In other words, the products are all laid out in an interesting and appealing way. I find that side of photography really tough and it is the part that is hard or impossible to teach if you don’t really have an eye for it.

If I were to offer some constructive criticism, its that the backdrop is not the most flattering. The uneven texture emphasizes the noise in the image, and the seam cutting through at an angle doesn’t really add anything and can be visually distracting. Similarly, some of the billowyness of the backdrop is creating light/dark areas that don’t add to the composition.

The types of products I shoot are not metallic, so I don’t have to worry about specular reflections, but it is something to keep in mind when photographing subjects like this. For example, the smooth metallic surfaces of these instruments really make things like dust/fuzz stand out. As an example, see the dial around and central bottom surface of the instrument on the left. This can be an aesthetic choice though (it almost look cobwebby), so that is why I just say to keep it in mind.

Great work! Keep it up!

You picked a difficult subject but did very good for a first attempt.

Specular reflections are difficult to manage. And the dark innards of the cases, too.

You’re learning composition at the same time - nice shot!

You’ve done great here!