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My wife created this green floral arrangement and asked me to photograph it for her. She wanted an image that she could use for decor (a wall hanging) that would tie in with a certain color scheme.

The first thing I do in a situation like this is hit my stash of books for lighting and set up inspiration. One of my favorites  is from HPBooks, vintage 1986 titled “Pro Techniques for Studio Photography
” by Jerry Fruchtman. This book is entirely film related but the techniques will apply equally to film and digital.

I now have a general idea of what I am going to do. I would like the green of the flowers (the color image is on the full article page) to be the dominate color and everything else as close to black and white as possible.

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The lighting for the flowers needs to come from above. I want the base to be black so I used black velvet. The background needs to go black at the edges and still provide separation.  Since the vase is glass filled with glass marbles I also need to use reflectors to highlight the edges or they will blend into the background.

Here is how I set up the photograph.

The background is a roll of Superior Dove Grey 53″ seamless background paper positioned about 5′ behind the vase.  To light the background I used a Vivitar 285 placed on a small table top tripod and set on the floor. The flash was pointed at the background but kept fairly level with the floor. I shaped the light with a piece of black FOAMIE wrapped around the flash. The 285 was set at 1/16 power and triggered with an optical slave plugged into its foot.

For the main light I used a WL5000 placed in a 24″ x 36″ softbox about 2′ above the flowers. I used this light at full power so I could get a small enough aperture to ensure adequate Depth of Field through out the flowers. WIth a test exposure I realized the tonal range was so great that the top of the flowers were blowing out while the underneath was blocking up.

To bring the exposure latitude into a recordable range I placed a piece of approximately 1′ x 2′ black construction paper inside the center of the softbox and added a silver reflector to both sides of the vase. The reflectors not only helped to brighten up the underside of the flowers but they also highlighted the edge of vase which helps to separate it from the background.

My final exposure was 1/125 @ f-14 ISO 100. Here is the color image:

I was pretty happy with the image, so is my wife. But one thing kept bothering me. The 2 leaf’s in the vase don’t have enough detail in my opinion. This made me start to think of how would this look as a black and white. So I loaded the image in Paint Shop Pro X2 and started to play with the channel mixer. What I found to be the best conversion was using the green channel only.

Tags: Black and White, Floral Arrangement, Flower, Glass Vase

This entry was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 at 2:06 am and is filed under Lighting, Studio, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.