I AM a professional photographer, although I do not play one on TV.
My advice: Your photos look very good. But talk to your wife and let her help you make them even better. You already have the eye for it I would add some fill light and get the background up by a stop or stop and a half.
If you do not have a photographer-spouse: The three biggest problems with pipe photography that I see:
1. Focus. Or out of focus, either by focus or movement. Cure: Even autofocus cameras and cell phones usually have a way to focus. Read the F'n manual and learn how to focus. Camera movement is the other focus problem, and that it caused by either too little light (the camera moves to a slow shutter speed) or operator error. If you have a tripod, use it. If it is too dark where you are making your photos, move over to the window, out of direct sun light. Even better, go outside in open shade. Remember that all cameras have a limit on how closely they can focus. If you can't focus, try moving the camera back a bit.
2. Light. Too often I see photos of pipes with no light on the pipe, or using direct flash and having too much light directly on the pipe. A happy medium is shooting outdoors in open shade (no direct sun, but with the light coming from the direction of the camera). Compromises would include shooting by a window and using reflectors pointing towards the pipe(white cardboard or paper works just fine, aluminum foil can be really cool).
2A. Exposure. OK, you have good light, now set the camera properly. A camera's lightmeter "sees" everything as 18% gray, about the tone of a gray sweatshirt. Go ahead and take a picture of a white wall (on autoexposure) and you will see that it comes out gray. So if the pipe is on a white background, the camera will expose it to come out gray and your pipe will be underexposed and too dark. The same holds true for a black background, but in reverse. The background will come out gray and the pipe will be overexposed and too light. Cure: Either learn to use manual exposure or put your pipe on a neutral gray background.
3. Color. Getting the color temperature correct is not always easy, but it is never very difficult. Try shooting on auto white balance and see what happens. if that isn't working, look at your light source (daylight, tungsten, etc.) and set your camera's white balance accordingly. That should put you in the ball park. More advanced tools would include shooting in Camera RAW and using photoshop to set the white balance in post production, but with a little thought and and reading the f'n manual, you can usually get pretty close just using camera settings.
Free tip of the day: Take a lot of pictures, but only show the really good ones.
