Before the tutorial though, I have a few tips to share:
1. Use a tripod. Just, please do. It'll give your image more stability, and more stability equals to more information in your pictures, which in turn makes it easier to draw from them. And while you're at it...Use the timer on your camera. It will prevent the shake that happens when you take your pictures.
2. Aperture. Smaller stops (larger f numbers) produce a longer depth of field, allowing objects at a wide range of distances to all be in focus at the same time. So, the smaller the stop, the more details you get in your background. I would say it is especially useful in photographing still life.
3. Set your Sensitivity meter to 100. I don't know about your camera but mine has its "Auto setting" set to 100, and there must be a reason for that. Noisy images are hard to work with. "Noise" is the grainy speckles that come up on your pictures when you set the Sensitivity meter too high. I actually made the mistake of setting my meter to 800, the highest setting on my camera, and kept getting noisy images but not knowing why. The bigger the number the better, right? Not so much... Think of it as an age.... When you reach a certain age, you'll start getting wrinkles. (You go higher than 100 on your sensitivity meter, you start getting noise.)
4. To make white things look really white. Set EV conpensation up by 2 notches. I learnt this because I stumbled upon a very good wildlife photography book in my local library. Your camera sees white things as a middle value, namely grey. To compensate for that, you "add light" to your pictures to make them white. Focus on the object once, adjust EV compensation, then snap away.
5. Have strong lighting. (Unless of course a dreamy effect is what you're after.) Lighting greatly determines what kind of pictures you get, how much values there are in your picture, and whether or not you'll want that picture as a reference. Which brings me to my tutorial.
To show you the difference between good lighting and bad one, here are two pictures with the exact same composition, but with different light sources.
Without Lighting.
With Lighting.
The first picture was taken on a cloudy day, without artificial lights. Of course, there are times when natural light works, however, today was not the day. The second picture is much better because it has a wide range of values, from white highlights to dark shadows. It was taken with a single artificial bulb on the left of the camera.
