Flowers make for beautiful and very patient subject for your studio photo sessions. They don't move and have that inner (and outer) beauty that just need a bit of sensibility to come out and fill the frame. Thing is that I’m not a flower photographer, at least not one of those that ravenously search fields and botanical gardens, I’m rather one of those that when there’s a flower at home grabs it and put it in front of the camera. I’m also the one who usually brings the floral gifts so at least I can pick those I think can make a nice subject too. 

Photographing flowers for me means soft light, soft images, and mostly a low key shot, well at least now, maybe tomorrow I’ll go hard and high key, truly don’t know… My set for this session was based in two lights, one for the flower and the other for the background. I didn’t use any reflector pursuing my quest of a light gradually fading and leaving an area into a certain degree of darkness. The light for the background carried a blue gel, in order to create a color contrast with the subject and also because I love blue background, they’re way classy!

The main light for all shots was one of my SB800 through a Lastolite EzyBox on camera left, while the other SB800 was gridded with a Honlphoto grid pointing at the black background. For each one of these three shots I was looking for something different and I hope it shows. Details, lighting, point of view and depth of field and of course, there has been a bit of work in Lightroom to come up with the final image. Water spray was used to enhance reflections and textures in a couple of flowers, and I think it is a good plus. Hope you like them, if you need any further information please drop a comment

Macro shots of products with a Fisheye lens

I’ve been thinking for a while about doing some macro stuff with the fisheye, and today I finally gave it a try. I have a Nikkor 10.fmm f2.8 fisheye lens that I really love. I don’t use it as much as I would because it the pictures tend to get tiring, but every once in a while it comes handy when doing some fishing portraits or landscapes.

This is quite an interesting result.

Not many people know that this lens can focus at a distance of…. I don’t know exactly but basically, you can rub the lens against the subject, as I proved once again today. You can then imagine how special of a macro lens can be. Everything is dramatically distorted; distance between foreground and background absolutely exaggerated, and quite some problems not get in between the light and what you are shooting

Still something that at least will make you smile

Well, if I can be let's say at 2cm from the subject, and have a softbox on top of me or slightly facing towards me, I will have to do some magic trick not to have the shadow of the camera, or my head, covering half of my product. Another issue is how to trigger the flash with the CLS. If I’m under the softbox, it is quite difficult that the sparkle of the pop up on my Nikon can be seen by the SB800 remote unit that is covered by the softbox itself. I leant it today the hard way.

Here we are getting worst, nothing really interesting about it

To find a solution I had to pull the good old’ remote cable and trigger the flash with that one, while putting the other flash in slave. Too bad my chord is so short that the softbox, most of the times, was falling on top of myself and the product. 

Anyway, when I started shooting the lure I had the confirmation that another of my fear was being confirmed. The background, for as wide and tall as it could be, was not enough to cover the 180º vision of the lens. Fortunately is not big deal because the light was quite dim and at 1/200sec and f9 everything turned almost dark (and I had room to further darken it in Lightroom).

Help me say: UGLY!

So I had my happy shooting with the 10.5mm Fisheye, and the results can be seen here, some fun even interesting, some plain awful. I will give it a try again in the future, but I have to work a bit on some details, especially lighting, which can be tricky. For these shots I had my two SB800 through a Lastolite Softbox III on camera left, and an Orbis Ring Flash on camera right

Metal Still Life

I studied THE BOOK “Light, Science and Magic” trying to understand the big deal of the Family of angles. Reflected and diffused light and did a bit of experiments

Using a black vinyl background and a metal lure can be a dangerous combination. I needed to keep the background black and make the lures shine, with a bit of reflection on the glossy plastic.

To achieve such result I used a combination of two lights, SB800 of course. One is bouncing the light off a big Lastolite 40” Umbrella box and the other one has an Orbis Ring Flash with it. Both light triggered with Nikon CLS.

First of all I made a sticky ball with duct tape to lift the jigs from the bottom. I put it in the back in order to achieve a bit of angle, reflect the light and show the length, height and width. Then I poured few drops of water to get more reflecting surface and decorate the image.

The Umbrella Box was placed 90º with the table. By doing so I had the light reflecting against the jigs but not the background that remained black. On the back of the jigs I had the other flash with the Orbis Ring to bring up the shadows a bit

Honestly, I love these still lives and will keep experimenting