Photographing clothes

[leighmartin]

Hi,

My first post. Here goes:

I'm really new to photography, and I'm trying to emulate the 'floating' clothes shots you see on so many garment websites: the ones that look like there's an invisible person wearing them. At the moment I'm just shooting garments on a mannequin against a white background and cutting the exposed parts of the mannequin out of the photo using paint shop pro. It's OK, but not great. Any ideas on how to do this?

This is a link to a site that has these sort of shots: http://www.cravematernity.co.uk/CraveMaternitySite/category/summer_knitwear.htm

And also - I'm just using my old canon A520? It's a great snapshot camera, and you can set a white balance, which is handy for this, but it's getting tired now and I could do with replacing it - any suggestions?

Thanks in advance
Leigh