Summer

This is a change from my usual floral portrait portfolio in that the flowers have been cut and arranged. I photographed them individually, and when finished, I thought it would be nice to see them all together.

Specific Feedback Requested

All comments are welcome.

Technical Details

Is this a composite: No

Lightbox behind the subject with two flash units in front.

Given those constraints, the only way to vary exposure is to change the ISO, but seldom go higher than 250.

100 mm prime lens, f22, ISO 200.

With these images, I always keep the aperture at f22 for the greatest Depth of Field, the flash units can be varied, but the lightbox flash is usually at 100%. I need to keep that high since the lightbox is positioned as far from the subject as possible to prevent light from creating halos around the edges.

paulgwiegman
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As usual, your lighting is amazing. The flowers have such depth. And I like the arrangement. There is something odd about the far right flower’s lower petal where it touches the stem, though. There a white space where I would expect to see the stem.

Beautiful boguet (sp?) , Paul! And really nice studio photo. Love your white backgrounds!

@Vanessa_Hill Thank you. I appreciate your kind words. My “studio” is a misnomer. In this case, I set up the equipment on a table on my front porch. Far more pleasant than a stuffy room.

@Bonnie_Lampley Thank you. The gap is because the edge of the petal is very thin, and with the strong back-light, the petal fringe becomes very close to pure white.

Below is a screenshot of that portion of the enlarged image.

Note that the stem splits at that point, and the semi-circle to the right is when a spent flower was attached. The slimmer left stem is the one holding the flower. It appears to have a gap, but it’s a skinny and nearly white portion of the petal.

You may wonder why the stem doesn’t cast a shadow. The light-box behind by 18" - 20" isn’t a point source of light but a large, broad panel. Light comes from the edges and fills in the shadow that should be there.

This is one of the parts of using a lightbox with a flash that needs special attention when setting up. If you get the lightbox too close to the subject, there is a lot of light “leaking” around the edges, producing a faint “cloud of light”. To compensate, the lightbox has to be moved back as far as possible.

Moving the lightbox back leads to two other problems. The box’s surface gets smaller in relation to the subject, and the plants don’t fit in the square, or round, of the white surface. Second, the light from the flash drops off when moved back, and the exposure changes.

It’s a trade-off that has to be balanced.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, @paul_g_wiegman! Quite interesting. Is it possible to do exposure blending to fix those bits or would that just be too much trouble for the tiny areas that are affected?

Paul this is a beautiful arrangement, and beautifully lit and photographed. Nice work. Just curious, how do you handle the diffraction at f/22? I use Capture One and it has a diffraction check box that works quite nicely at f/16 and f/22.

Cheers,
David

@Bonnie_Lampley Thank you, Bonnie. Exposure blending does work. I have to do it by adjusting the ISO. It gets dicey adjusting the flash output in the lightbox because no matter what power is used, the background is adjusted to 255,255,255 in post-processing. Plus, I want as much light from the back to make the plant parts as translucent as possible. But, as you say, it’s a lot of work for such a tiny area, and it’s something that happens on only a few flowers. Thanks for the suggestion.

@David_Bostock I use a Zeiss 100 prime lens for these images, and the diffraction is at a minimum at best. 99% of post-processing is either Lightroom or Camera Raw, with only the chop at the bottom right being added in PhotoShop. I’m not particularly eager to use various software because I’m not fond of the DNG images going through too many shifts. It’s old-fashioned, and I’m sure multiple software packages are quality products, but it’s just my approach. I’m adverse to even adding filters on my lenses since it’s one more layer of glass to add distortions.

Namaste

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Hi Paul,

The arrangement of the flowers makes for an awesome comp. I have no nits for you as I like this one as presented.

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Paul: A beautiful arrangement superbly captured. Marvelous work.>=))>

Paul, besides the vibrant colors and nice arrangement, I like the spiky green stems sticking out!

Thanks, @Vanessa_Hill @David_Bostock @Jim_Zablotny @Mark_Muller @Bonnie_Lampley @Bill_Fach

I love it! @Mark_Muller You know, I never looked at the arrangement that way. Now I can’t look at it and think about the “spiky green” things. They are the leaves of the spiderwort (small blue flowers). It’s interesting how the view of others can impact one’s own view. That’s the kind of input that makes this forum so special.

Namaste

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