Photography tips for texturing?

If I were to hire a photographer to take some photos of objects, plants and such that I will be using as SL textures, what guidelines would I give him? Obviously he'd need to be able to make the background transparent, but what else would be considered unique to texturing as opposed to taking a "normal" photo?

The excellent book 3D Games Textures by Luke Ahearn has a whole chapter on this. He says take photographs on a cloudy day to avoid high contrast images. Avoid high contrast shadows. Also if you are photographing objects with straight lines and right angles, like a door or a window, take the photograph straight on to avoid perspective distortion. The perspective distortion can be sort of fixed in photoshop but not perfectly.

I would also explain the concept of tiling and point out tiling challenges such as banding.

Any object you want as a texture needs to stand out from the background. For instance, if you are photographing a light colored object, make the background dark.......vise versa. I've dabbled in photography for most of my life.....if you can selectively blur the background (even if it similar in color to the object), you should be able to cut your subject out with relative ease. And to be real serious with detail, use light colored pieces of fabric (called umbrellas) to reflect the light onto the subject to help get rid of shadows..........white poster board works too. You want as even lighting as you can get. Not harsh light..........soft, even light. Cloudy days help. Don't use flash if indoors......take longer exposures to compensate.