Feathers on a White Background.? Help!

A hospital wants three five foot prints each with a composition of many individual photos of feathers on white backgrounds. Black backgrounds are easy, like the one pictured. White tends to blow out the fine downy parts of the feathers. Any help?
Some possible avenues toward a solution:
Lighting. I have tried a bunch of things but everything gets blown out.
Photoshop. I cannot get the downy parts to layer without including background color.
An off white or light grey background. These colors will have to be exactly the same for each photo since they will be composited.

Maybe a backlit diffuser board but might be tricky to keep the lighting uniform for each shoot.

Featherfolio wrote in post #19055922
A hospital wants three five foot prints each with a composition of many individual photos of feathers on white backgrounds. Black backgrounds are easy, like the one pictured. White tends to blow out the fine downy parts of the feathers. Any help?
Some possible avenues toward a solution:
Lighting. I have tried a bunch of things but everything gets blown out.
Photoshop. I cannot get the downy parts to layer without including background color.
An off white or light grey background. These colors will have to be exactly the same for each photo since they will be composited.

Hosted photo: posted by Featherfolio in
./showthread.php?p=190​55922&i=i71176759
forum: Macro

I would use Manual exposure with soft lighting to start. Adjust from there. And shoot in RAW.

Well I love the on-black one.

All I can suggest with the lowering of contrast on a white background is pull up the black-point up in post, if using photoshop then add a levels adjustment layer in luminosity blend mode. If you hold the alt key down when you drag the back-point up on the x-axis of the histogram you get a shadows clip indication, apologies if you are familiar with this technique.

I use this a lot with zoo shots where the subject is behind wire or glass which can really stuff the contrast.

Thank you Lester, I will give that a try in photoshop. Feathers are tricky because they need to be sidelit to pull out the shadows and the fine detail. Also they are three dimensional so I often use stacking for clear focus. But the hardest part is getting the fluff not to pick up the background color if I need to process the feather background color in photoshop.

Have you tried shooting under a couple of stops? The color should still be there in the feathers and maybe brought back up in PS