I will be mainly be using the camera I by indoors to shoot our pianos that we have for sale in our showroom. It is very important that the photos show the detail that our pianos have to offer. Many of them have carvings, exquisite veneers, etc. To really make our photos really look great, I am trying to decide what camera I should buy - 40D or XSI or XTI. Since I'll be using a tripod most the time, I'm also trying to decide whether to buy the Tamron 17-55mm lens or spend more money for the Canon 17-55mm lens. Thanks to anyone that puts their two sense in, I'd really appreciate it!
Budget would be up to $2,000 - $3,000. Whatever is needed to have some excellent looking photos.
I would seriously recommend getting a professional photographer (who's done large product photography before and can show you examples) to do the shots if you can budget for that instead. Outstanding product photography doesn't simply take a good camera, it takes a good photographer with lights, flags, modifiers and a bunch of stuff that would blow your budget and could take you months to learn to use well. Also, it's my experience that folks rarely purchase high-end items based on photos on a Web site even if they're great photos.
If you want to learn product photography, that's a different thing than trying to move inventory and get good product shots to do so. Pianos are large, so you're going to want to start with large lights- the strobist route would fit your budget but be a poor choice for lighting your subject- a 7 or 8 foot octobox would be a good primary light source for a piano, or large diffusion sheets like most automobile shooters use for showroom shots. In general, you want diffusers/softboxes to be around the same size as your subject- that makes the strobist route a poor choice for the large surface area and curves of a piano.
You could probably start with 3-4 strobes, some large diffusion panels, a grid, a softbox and either a good "stage" area or two large backgrounds, but that's likely going to break your budget *without* a camera[1]. For showing off details, you're going to want some magnification, perhaps even a macro lens- you may be able to get away with one of the cheap 50mms for Web resolution images, but you're going to have difficulty without 2-3 lenses to get anything that looks good going from a whole-piano shot to very minute details unless you want to spend lots of hours cropping and post-processing every shot, and even then you may still not get the results you want.
If you're set on the idea, then I'd suggest starting with "Light, Science and Magic" as a cover-to-cover read, followed by some product photography books- look for ones that deal with large products though. I wouldn't get a camera until you're sure you can get acceptable results- if you're not getting the shots now with your current camera for Web-resolution shots, I submit that you're not likely to get significantly better shots by changing cameras- this sort of product photography is more about lighting and placement than megapixels and lenses.
[1] You could build your own diffusion panels to save money- but I still think the appropriate lighting is outside your budget if you want professional results.
