It being time to offload a bunch of lenses I don't use anymore, I thought I'd have a go at photographing them to put up on ebay. Having never tried "product photography" before, I adopted a simple approach. I had one flash, a shoot-through umbrella and a reflector.

If you shoot with direct flash, you get something stark like this:

Who would wanna buy a lens that looks like that?! No one. However, with a setup like the one below, using Minolta's innovative wireless flash system...

...and warming up the white balance a tad, we get something a little nicer. The picture below is lit as above, but the lens is sitting on a glass-framed orange graphic instead of a roll of silver wrapping paper. Now that's a lens I'd open my wallet for!

Equipment used: Sony a700, Carl Zeiss 24-70mm f2.8, Velbon tripod, mic stand with boom to hold roll of wrapping paper, gold reflector, Sony HVL-56AM flash and shoot-through umbrella mounted on Manfrotto 026 light umbrella clamp fixed to another mic stand. 

More examples below. As it's my first attempt at this kind of photography, I don't have any pearls of wisdom to offer. Having said that, I'm pretty pleased with the results. The gold tone was achieved by warming up the white balance significantly in Aperture (vignetting and other minor tweaks were also applied).