Cheap "studio" lighting

These photos were made in an improvised studio, using two 100W tungsten projectors (bought at a hardware store) mounted on low-cost tripods, a black card as background and some of my wife's flowers. The motivation came from a post by Cynthia Farr-Weinfeld on her "Photo Quest" blog. Her experiments (and nice results) with a few tulips and a similar setup made me want to try.

Pentax K10D + Zeiss Sonnar 85/2.8 + extension tube

One of the projectors was placed above and slightly behind the flowers. The other was next to the camera. I used a light dimmer on the second one, so that I could balance the shadows created by the first projector. I used ISO 400 and f11 or f16 for the shots. The results were quite promising. The undiffused light creates harsh shadows, but this brings out the texture of the petals. I hope to be able to try this again soon and work more on composition and light source placement.