Back in the long distant past if you wanted to demonstrate your photo skills the photographing a white egg on a white background using flash and transparency film preferably on a large format 4×5 camerawas the way to do it. Totally manual exposure taking into account the mag factor. Understanding that a sheet of Fuji Provia 100 only had 6 stops of dynamic range. Now it is depressingly easy to shoot in these digital times with E-TTL flash metering and LCD displays with histograms. But then all this techno goodness should free us to make wonderful art.

Canon EOS5d, Sigma 105 f2.8 macro, Canon 550EX & 430 EX Speedlites fired wirelessly by a Canon ST-E2.