Happy to help but you need to give us some idea of the subject you intend to shoot and the equipment you have available.

Thanks for the advice so far.  As for the type of subjects I think I should start out with something small and easy.  Maybe food dishes and pastries?  Or small figurines?

And as for equipment, just my camera (and a tripod).     BTW Bateleur, what kind of light do you use to burn out the background?  There's a Ritz Camera nearby here, so if they have lighting equipment I might grab up something depending on what I learn (and need). 

... a crease, a spot, a stray fly.

lol

To the OP -
I use a sheet of white vinyl laid over, and up the wall behind, my bench and sheets of non-bleed art paper (it has no grain and gives relatively grain free shadows) to sit my subjects on. I bounce all my lighting off a white ceiling, in effect turning my whole spare bedroom studio into a giant soft box. In photoshop I use various methods of touchup depending on the subject, my favourite best and fastest I've found is to select the background with the select colour range tool and blast up the levels to get pure white. This method preserves the shadows best. Selecting the shadows and hitting the gaussian blur softens them nicely. Some subjects require pen tool selection, inversion and deleting the background with a white layer beneath. I don't like this method, its time consuming and if I want a shadow I have to create one but sometimes it unavoidable to get a clean isolation. (I also clone out the stray flys and dog hairs . Isolations are extremely saleable. Experimentation with what you have available is really the only way to learn, I'm still learning .... Best of luck and have fun.
Sandra