Indoor floral photography

You 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 intricate 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-

chid at right is an exception. I took this in my living room as the sun streamed in through a high window to backlight the flower. Still, notice the contrast.

The background is critical. If you include discernable elements in the room, even if they are out of focus, they will invariably be distracting. Any kind of non-obtrusive background can work such as a plain or textured wall, a solid white poster board, a piece of fabric with a subtle, complementary pattern, or a simple black background. The latter is what I prefer, and I choose to use black velvet because it absorbs light better than any other type of fabric. All you need is one yard of the material.

As I’ve mentioned, I feel flowers should be sharp. There are always exceptions, and sometimes it’s attractive to have shallow depth of field where only a sliver of the flower is sharp and the entire environment is soft. However, it’s the beautiful detail -- the color, the shape, and the design -- that draws our eyes to flowers. While a blur of color can be artistic, it seems to me the flower itself is then lost in the translation. This is why I use f/32 -- or f/8 with focus stacking -- to insure every petal and all the interior structures of the flower, as well as the stem, are sharp.

Another approach to indoor flower portraiture is to illuminate the flower with a lightbox. Simply lay the flower on the lighted Plexiglas surface and see the thin, translucent petals glow with light. If you don’t have a small, portable lightbox like the one shown at right, you can use white or frosted Plexiglas or a sheet of glass with a piece of waxed paper taped to the underside. A photoflood or a light bulb of any type placed beneath the surface of the Plexiglas or glass will provide the same type of light as the lightbox.

My favorite type of flowers to shoot with this kind of diffused backlighting are white blossoms like the lilly below. White on white is a magical color scheme in nature. Colored flowers like the petunia with a few rain drops on it on the next page also work. With this kind of bright background, exposure becomes an important issue. Since meters are designed to read medium tones, i.e. middle gray, the bright light of the lightbox or backlit Plexiglas confuses the meter and your pictures will be underexposed. You can do two things to rectify this and end up with the correct exposure: First, you can set the exposure com-

pensation feature on your camera to overexposure. The exact amount of the adjustment has to be determined by test exposures, but I would start at plus 1-2/3 f/stops.

Second, you can simply let the exposure become underexposed and then make the corrections in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom. For the petunia above, that’s what I did and you can see the results are perfect.

Still lifes

For still life arrangements that include flowers, you can still use diffused daylight streaming in the room from outdoors. However, I would use a large French door or sliding glass door because the light covers a larger area. You’ll also need a larger piece of fabric. For the shot at right, I bought a 2-yard piece of black velvet. §