One day a few years back, my wife and I were in Old Sacramento (a cool place, especially the railroad museum!), and we happened upon a street-fair/flea-market. As we were walking around admiring all the cool old stuff, we spied this absolutely beautiful sewing-machine.

When I saw the scrollwork on the front-plate, and the general beauty of the machine, I knew I had to have some pictures of it! When I offhandedly asked if it was for sale, and for how much, the seller (a nice local lady) said “sure!” and ” $35.00…”

Needless to say, I was immediately lugging the machine back to our car (not wanter her to realize she only said $35.00), as I knew a studio shot would be much better than a noonday grab shot of this work of art.

The set-up here was to take a quilt made by Tall Pines Quilting (909-867-7187 ask for Elaine), and set the machine up on a table, with the quilt wrapped around it.

It was lit by 3 Nikon SB-800’s and 2 Nikon R1 macro-flashes. I had gels on the 2 R1s, and snoots and umbrellas on the SB-800s. With everything under the control of the SB-800 Master, it was a piece of cake to vary the flash output (of all 5-flashes) and play around with the set-up.

The shot was taken with my D200 & 105mm Micro-Nikkor, pretty much wide open. Manfrotto tripod and gear-head too.

Although the machine may be out-dated by newer tools, like a good-person, it’ll never be put out to pasture.

This isn’t the last you’ll see of this beauty!