White backgrounds look lighter and neater in my opinion. For pictures of
larger shells taken for the SW Florida Shells inventory at The
Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum Web site I use a nice, heavy black velvet to
achieve an almost pure black background. Not cheap but a good investment.
Then, using Photoshop,  I drop a pure white paint bucket onto the black
background thereby changing black for white. A little touching-up takes
care of imperfections on the background, but this is minimized from scratch
because I use an air blower to remove dust specs from the black
velvet.  This system works quite well because, as I mentioned before, I
like the clean looks of the white background, but wouldn't be able to
achieve the shadowless results I do had I used a white background to begin
with.

The camera is a Nikon D-100 with 105 and 60 mm Micro-Nikkor lenses donated
by the Sanibel-Captiva Shell Club to the Shell Museum. I also use a Nikon
PB-6 Bellows or move the camera onto our Leica dissecting scope to achieve
higher magnifications. Check our results at
http://www.shellmuseum.org/sanibel_shells.html.

Cheers from Sanibel (96 degrees in the shade today),

José

__________________________________________________________________________
José H. Leal, Ph.D., Director
The Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum
Editor, The Nautilus
www.shellmuseum.org

3075 Sanibel-Captiva Road
Sanibel, FL 33957 USA
(239)395-2233
fax (239)395-6706