The nice elderly lady across the street recently passed away. Her son and daughter-in-law were having an estate sale and my wife and I went over to see how it was going. I saw their old Royal typewriter (made in 1933). It was pretty beat up but I inquired about taking some pictures of it, if no one purchased it, since I recently bought a macro lens. After a while my wife comes back and says that they, the son and daughter-in-law, are looking forward to the photo that I'm going to take for them. Doh!
Anyway I started looking into flat lay photography and after a lot of adding, subtracting, moving, etc., this was the final photo and the son and daughter-in-law really liked it.
We have an older desk in the office and I used that as a base. Luckily there was already a circular ring from a glass. So I set up my tripod on top of the desk, inverted the neck and mounted the camera pointing down. The big issue I had was the amount of distortion the lens produced when I added the old camera. The feet of the camera were pretty far apart so I propped up one side of the camera with some folded pieces of paper.
The scene also includes an old pipe and ash tray that belonged to my father. We found some old coins including a couple of buffalo nickels. There was an old photo of a family relative. My wife had some crafting sheets that had the tickets, postcard and other old looking papers. The tea cup is an antique that my mom had and is over 100 years old. The camera is a Yashica that was my grandfathers.
This was probably way too much info but I wanted to create a worthy keepsake for Miss Charlotte's son and daughter-in-law.