My wife complains that I don’t buy her flowers enough. So today I bought some flowers and started taking pictures of them. Now I can hang these pictures on the wall and we will have flowers forever. Problem solved.
Well, maybe it isn’t that simple. Maybe she’ll want real flowers once in a while too. That’ll be great because I enjoy taking pictures of flowers anyway. That was the real reason I bought these flowers and she knew it. I just wanted to take some pictures tonight and I decided shoot flowers.
I picked up four kinds of flowers and also a vase to hold them up for the shots. The total price was about $25. Not bad for an evening of photography.
I used a black paper background for these shots. In the future I will do similar shots with different colored backgrounds. But this time I used black. I actually had a roll of black background paper that I hung from a background stand. But you could just tape black sheet of poster board to the wall. If you do then try to get some that isn’t very glossy.
I used a total of three lights for these shots. I wanted to show off the textures and to do that I lit from both sides. I placed an Alien Bees B400 light on the left and right of the flower and shot them through a translucent umbrella. This put some highlights and created shadows that gave the texture I wanted but it was still kind of dark on the inside of the flower. I need to throw some light in there.
I started by placing a silver reflector on the table just in front of the flower. I was hoping that would throw enough light in there to open it up but that didn’t quite do it. So I used a third light, this one a Nikon SB800 speedlight with diffuser cap on it.
I also took the liberty of composing my shots in such a way that the flowers were cropped about half way. The reason I did this is because I am hoping someone may purchase these images and use them for a card or an advertisement. The large empty space gives a graphic designer to place her message. It is also kind of artsy. Just a plain old picture of a flower would be kind of boring. So I moved around and tried to see the flower differently.
And by the way, the lens I used was a Nikkor 70-200 mm F/2.8. That isn’t a cheap lens but it is worth every penny. I’d love to get a nice macro lens for shots like this. I don’t have one since this isn’t the type of photography I normally do.
In any case, I had fun and now I have some nice flower images that I can upload to my website. Have a good one.
