I'm a member of a museum that has asked me to photograph a model of a sailing ship. The ship is historically important, and the museum, in what is a major undertaking, is going to start building it to full scale next summer. The fellow who made the model did a beautiful job, fom both historic and aesthetic perspectives, and the organisation wants to use a photograph of the model to raise money through the sale of postcards, prints, T-shirts, etc. The model is about 32" long by 31" high by 7" wide.

I haven't agreed to do this yet and I'm not going to unless I can come up with a way to make an image of the model that will sell. On that score, I'm getting discouraged. In an attempt to find inspiration, I've now looked at a few hundred photographs of ship models on the internet. The ones that I've seen are uniformly pedestrian. A picture of a model sitting on a cradle, or with the cradle swathed in fabric, which is generally how it's done, just doesn't excite me. There seems to be a disconnect between how these models look in person and how they look in a photograph. I can't imagine anyone except an avid model boat builder wanting to buy one of these images on a postcard or anything else.

When the museum first asked me to undertake this, I told them that I would want to photograph the model out of its case, and suspend it in the air with clear nylon fishing line in order to get it off its cradle and reveal the whole of the hull. Any evidence of the line could be removed in Photoshop. It turns out that Scandinavian churches often have model ships in them that are suspended from above, and I'm somewhat encouraged by photographs that I've seen of this arrangement. Beyond that, I'm stumped, and I'm beginning to wonder whether I should just accept the model for what it is, cradle and all, rather than try to reinvent how it appears.

Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.