Latest acquisition - another 1916 DWM

[Zamo]

Thanks for the nice comments guys, both on my pistol, and my pictures. I wish I was more of an expert on both.
As for the pistol, This is the fourth 1916 DWM I've had while trying to get just the right one, and I am happy with it. It is currently my ONLY Luger! (How's that for fighting the addiction???!!!), I shipped off my last other two to new homes today.
As for the pictures, I wish I could say I was a pro photographer with all sorts of fancy equipment and years of experience and training, but that's not the case. The truth is, I race Vintage Motocross when I'm not collecting firearms, and while not battling on the track, I take pictures of the other riders, and sometimes get some of them posted by a friend on his website. This limited experience has taught me how to compose, crop, brighten, and otherwise enhance my digital pictures.
When I started taking pictures of my modest collection, I took note of what I liked in other peoples pictures, and experimented until I got it the way I liked it. That's why, if you peruse my website, you'll see a lot of this uniform white background under bright light. It works, and I'm too stupid to come up with anything better. I'd like to try a black background one of these days, but haven't been able to find a suitable drop cloth yet.
Here are a couple photos showing "How it's done":
First, wait 'til the wife and kids go to bed, next, peel the dinner table's table cloth back, and fold it over, thus exposing the white side as apposed to the nifty colored dealy-a-ma-bob side the wife picked out last time she was at Yak-mart. This is why you wait 'til she goes to bed, most of my firearms have a bit of oil on them, and more often than not, some of this same said oil mysteriously ends up on the underside of the Mrs.'s tablecloth. I am at a loss to explain this phenominon to her.

*note the high tech lighting...Home Depot's finest track lighting...

Next, compose your shot, by placing your firearm, and maybe some accessories, in either a seeming random arrangement, or uniformly lined up in strict profile, or perhaps, even a jaunty angle...

Now, take your digital SLR camera (the previous two were taken with my 2.0megapixel cellphone camera, note the difference), and using the "auto" macro setting, and with the flash attached and set to bounce just the right amount of light from the ceiling (again, experimentation), snap six or seven shots, fiddling with the flash's power setting, and angle all the while. I use the highest resolution the camera supports, which is 3008x2000 "fine". If I had spent more on the next camera up, I could have gotten better, but I knew most of my images would never be printed, and would almost all stay on a computer screen, so I figured this camera's 6 megapixel capacity was just fine. Larger ones allow you to crop smaller portions, and retain them at a good resolution, but I have been very happy with the D50.
If you're lucky, this "shotgun" approach will yield a few good pics, and you can then crop them, fiddle with brightness and contrast, etc. until you're happy, and then, post them up on the web so that lots of wonderful people you'll likely never meet can enjoy them almost as much as you!

And that, my fine fellows, is EXACTLY how I do it. I'm not kidding about "shotgunning" it, either. My Nikon D50 is about two years old, and the internal counter tells me I've shot exactly 14,225 pictures! I know because it started over again at 10,000, and I was amazed then, and now am up to 4,225. It helps that I have two little boys I take lots of pictures of too. If you're hemming and hawing on the price of a DSLR, take note of this and average the cost out. It was one of the best "tech" purchases I've ever made, and it was about the same as a spendy P.38, or a shooter Luger.
Sorry to run on here, but there were enough questions on this, I thought I'd try and answer them.
Again, thanks for your kind words, and I hope this helps some of you with your future picture taking.
Oh, one more thing, I never, NEVER could have done this with a film camera. Just the cost of 14k pictures would have bankrupted me years ago, even with Costco!