Concept: House Warming Bouquet
A few weeks ago we had a lovely housewarming party and some of the guests brought flowers. Being that I'm an insane "take pictures of flowers!" kick, I thought I'd try and take some more macro photos of them. This time, I decided to try something totally different than the previous project. This time I wanted to completely control the environment so I setup a small studio in my office and tried to control all of the external factors (wind, lighting, background, etc). Normally I try and take pictures of plants and flowers in the natural habitat, but since these were already in a nice, easily mobile vase, I think it was fair.
For some technical bits (you can skip over this part if you don't really care how I setup this shoot):
I setup a table with a white paper background (changed to red and brown for a few of the shots). I used my 100mm macro lens set on Manuel with the setting of f/5.0 to f/6.3 and a speed of 1/60 to 1/80 (all at ISO 100). On camera I had a 580EX II flash and on a stand I was using a 430EX flash (as a fill light). I changed the power output of the flashes, rather than the aperture or shutter speed on the camera to fix any lighting issues. I'm told this is the method that portrait photographers use when taking studio shots - lock in the aperture and SS and let the flashes do all the work! I also used a direct connection from the camera to the laptop so I could see the photos better and see how the lighting was (rather than using the little 2" screen on the camera). This was a great technique and I would highly recommend, if you can use your computer as your camera's "LCD screen", do it!
Enjoy!
As a "teaser", here is a warm-tinted alternate version of a shot I'll be posting later. (remember, click on the picture to make it larger so you can see more of the details!)
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