Indoor Floral Photography
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ou might think that photographing flowers indoors requires a lot of expensive studio gear such as strobes, softboxes, canvas backdrops, diffusion panels, snoots, barn doors, and so on. You can definitely use all this stuff, but it’s not necessary to produce beautiful ‘portraits’ of a single flower or an arrangement of flowers. The iris below and the columbine flower at the bottom of the next page are examples of beautiful shots of flowers taken with the simplest of setups. You need just three things: a piece of black fabric, preferably black velvet or velveteen; window light; and a small lens aperture for complete depth of field. Since flowers have such intri-
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cate detail, I feel the entire subject or subjects should be sharp. The Details Window light is one of the most beautiful types of light for many subjects such as portraits, still lifes, and flowers. It is always available in the daytime, and it is free, soft and diffused. This means contrast is low, and that in turn means exposure can be based on middle toned values. In most cases, you want to avoid direct sunlight streaming in through the window. This increases contrast significantly, and the resulting images are usually degraded. In art, of course, there are always exceptions. The or-
