I just use photobucket's editor. It's not very good, but if you adjust the pictures just right (by hand) and color in the shadows you can make them look like that. If the pictures are brighter and have less shadow to start with you don't mess up the colors. I put the snakes on a white board with white poster board behind, edit with photobucket-all by hand, and they turn out like this
You don't have to spend a bunch of money on light tents and photo editors to have beautiful picturesSorry to the OP, I don't want to high jack!!!
To the OP, Dave, if you can adjust your flash your pictures will be much easier to edit. On my camera you can set the intensity of the flash. It's nothing real fancy-a PowerShot SD790 IS Cannon. It's hard to figure out how to do it so you might have to real the manual. If your camera doesn't have that option you can do what I used to doI would stand on a chair and zoom in till the flash was bright enough, but didn't wash the picture out.