when used with a tripod, level and 10-17 fisheye (placing straight lines dead center to make them straight) I'm as certian as I could possibly be, that any alighnment issues with the camera would be obvious...so mine must be ok.

so as not to confuse the issue, the above advice should work for you, but if you have trouble with glare (shiny pages for example) and burnt out highlights, I will help you with that also....hint: requires polarizers, but cross that bridge if you need to later.

it doesn't matter where the fault lay.
the important thing is to make the most of a bad situation.
I heard there is a leaning tower of pizza somewhere that needs to be straightened up....
so go photograph that, and I'm sure everything will come out level.
Bring me back some of that pizza ok?

I think i posted a while back a light tent made from a cheap laundry hamper, but you could also try getting to the hardware store and grabbing a white plastic shower curtian, and some white pvc pipe and some "T" and "L" fittings and construct your own......any large sheet of paper will work for backdrops.

I think with time you tend to shoot less images, and keep more.
Way back when, I shot as much as I could afford. These days I can take as many as I want but shoot way less.

Gerri is like "Oh look a deer!" snap, snap, snap....

I'm like "so what, the light sucks" or "so what, the background is blah" or "so what, it's not a top looking specimen"

so my amount of keepers is fairly constant but my amount of throw aways has gone down over time.

if you have enough memeory cards, do shoot raw or (raw + jpeg on the 10d).
from experience I can tell you this: It's ok to shoot jpegs if you're real good, and theres little chance of blowing the shots. Raw is like shooting print film and jpeg is like shooting slide film in terms of exposure lattitude....you get more to work with when things need fixing.

you can always get some advice or help in processing a raw file here, later, whereas you know what happens if you need to repair a jpeg.....

I had to wait for a good raw workflow tool to fully switch from jpeg to raw, but since Aperture, I'd never shoot an important shot, without hitting the raw button on the 10d. (the tools by the way work on jpegs too, but when you take a "bad" raw shot and work it hard to make it look good, then try the same amount of corrections on the same image shot in jpeg, (lift and stamp tool) the limits of jpeg become obvious.).

That repair/hack, (while one can't argue with the results) looks a little girly to me....now duct tape...there's a mans' tool...comes in black too
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all in the lighting...i'm sure you could create a similsr shot with a light tent and one flash unit.

could easily have made the dvd cover of one of my favorite comic book based movies..."The Crow"

there was a time when those HUGE, WHOPPING, FAST four gigabyte hard drives were considered, to unstable for storing valuable data, and us photogs needed zip drives with thier 100 megs of safety.

with a card like that, wifi and an applescript or automator program, the though occurs to me that I'd never have to think about "Manually" downloading ever again.

Camera comes withing range of one of my macs, connects, downloads to aperture, backs up, then erases images from camera...