Milestones
I celebrated a milestone birthday yesterday. After two ballroom dance lessons to help me prepare for a competition in a few days, I spent hours trying to get my computer and new cable modem to speak to one another. It wore me down. I bought some Italian takeout food for me and my two adult kids. They gave me some awesome gifts to feed my passion for photography. And then my girlfiend Linda surprised me with some lisianthus flowers. "Maybe you could photograph them,” she said.
After another dance lesson this morning I got down to business. I like the look of flowers agaist a dark background, so I set up a charcoal gray paper backdrop next to my black marble topped kitchen island. For the main light, I used a Profoto B10 plus with a reflector and 10-degree grid to focus on the delicate flowers from camera right. There was too much black in the photo, so I added a B10 with 20-degree grid as a rim light, placing it behind the flowers, camera left. There still was too little light hitting the base of the vase, even with a reflector. So I added a third B10 in a 1x3’ softbox. I tried putting the softbox vertically, which was all right, but I liked it better when it was horizontal, just skimming the front of the vase at about table height. I added a reflector to throw some light into the darket shadows.
This is the process we follow in most studio shots. We gradually build up the light so that we know exactly what each one is contributing. I started out by shooting into my camera but soon tethered into my laptop using Capture One Pro, a software package designed for the process. It enables me to see far more details when I am shooting. That can save hours of post-processing time because you notice stray shadows or glints of light that you can fix in-camera rather than trying to fix the images later.
I would much rather photograph people, but these lisianthus flowers captivated me with their papery petals and their dance-like stems. I used a Mexican vase that my sister bought me years ago for another birthday. It had just the right size opening to hold the flowers in place. I noticed one flower had a yellow stamen showing, so I tried adding some bananas and lemons to bring out the colors and connect the table to the scene so that it wouldn’t look like the vase was floating in space. In portraiture, we would add a scarf, a flower, a hat or some other accessories to do something similar. I tell my subjects to bring what they like when they come. One brought a small animal skull. We tried to use it but ultimately found it too confusing. We want the images to tell a story. That’s why I added some peppers to the shot of the lisianthus flowers. They made the scene more Mexican, which tells you something about me.
I will keep this short, as I have two more hours of dance practice ahead of me tonight. Stay safe. Be positive. Give thanks.
