Shooting in a light tent

This is slightly off subject but still deals with photography. I would like to take images of my small 1/43 scale diecast vehicles. I'm not sure what is the best lens to use, I was thinking 100mm macro, but I've seen some done with the 18-55 that look very good.
As its tuff to get everything infocus, I've been experimenting with shooting various shots with different focus points and then manually blending them in CS3. I've heard you can do this with a merge , but I'm not sure how.
I'm going to try and make my own light tent using PVC tubing and some lighter cloth material.
I would also like to try shooting several shots with light coming in from different angles and then blending them as well, since I only have one off camera flash. Could this work?
Any advice or help would be appreciated.

There's Layers, Adjustment Layers, Layer Masks, Blend(ing) Layers... and you should start learning a little about all of them.
Look at the the links in post #8 of: Tough Exposure question

The 100mm macro is a good choice, & shooting in a light tent will work, too. It's what I call "quick & dirty" in that it's useful for someone who has 500 images to shoot for a catalog, or someone who doesn't understand light & wants a reasonable shot without too much work. Personally, I prefer to put the reflections I get where I want them to be. Look at the knife & Browning threads here:
FAQ - Studio Lighting
One of them shows an example using just one light source.

And good luck!

The way I manually blended them was by using layer masks. Its not that I don't know how, actually after a lot of practice I'm getting better at it all the time. I just don't have all the equipment as far as lighting and such.
The light tent seems to work very well, especially for very small items.
I did a shot of a small car the other day and used 4 focus points, then using layer masks blended them all in to get the entire car infocus.
But at the same time I would like to take say 3 or 4 shots lighting different sides, front, rear, maybe even the top and then blend those in as well with the focus shots. Would that work?
BTW on that train shot at night I would be surprised If you could get the whole shot in anyways, because the train is moving and its at night. In order to get in in focus you would need lots of light or a very slow shutter speed which would blur everything except the background. If you could get the train sharp enough some how you could blend it in with the background, but HDR would be a tuff choice I think for that situation.

I don't see how you could blend both the focus bracketing and the variable lights shots, unless you took two sets for each focal plane, each set with the alternative lighting, and tried to blend them all together. That would be pretty messy...

An alternative in Photoshop would be to use the directional lighting tool. I don't recall the name of the filter, but you can create a light "set up" to apply to your image -- it might be interesting to try out, but I can't hunt for it right now -- maybe someone who sees this can chime in.

Ideas for a light box.

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=281524

Bsmooth wrote in post #9713720
I've heard you can do this with a merge , but I'm not sure how.

This is a new feature in PSCS4.
There's also dedicated software for it.
http://en.wikipedia.or​g/wiki/Focus_stacking