A photo both set up shot

[ChasWG]

Here's a set up shot of how I photography my orchids

It's actually really simple, though some of this equipment isn't your every day kind of stuff, but it is fairly cheap and readily available online.

First I have a 100 watt second studio strobe blasting through an old shoe box with a window cut out and some tracing paper taped to the inside. This gives a nice soft, strong light. Then on the opposite side I have a white peice of foamcore to bounce some fill light back into the dark side of the plant.

All flowers look great with some backlight on them so I mounted an older, used, eBay bought Canon 540EZ flash unit with some 1/4 CTO gell over the flash head to color the light slightly orange to help out the color of the leaves. This flash is set to 1/32nd or 1/64th power. It also adds a little fill light. It was triggered using an opticle slave mounted to the hotshoe of the flash.

I like to set the plant on a piece of white construction paper. It bounces a little light back up into the plant. It is also long enough to wrap upward and can act as an infinity syce. In this case I used a piece of black on one side, white on the other foamcore to act as the background.

Here's the set up shot.


And here's the result of the setup.




These were all shot with my Canon 40D. The orchid only shots were done with my Canon 70-200 f4 L lens and the set up shot was done using my Tamron 10-24mm lens.

Did you notice the table cloth in the set up shot? Yes, orchids...

[Becky15349]

Very nice!! I bet you could put on your digital macro setting and get right up in those neo's faces so we could practically smell them

[ChasWG]

"Digital macro"? The Canon 40D is a DSLR, any macro that this camera can do only comes via a macro lens and unfortunatly I don't own one, yet...

I might try the reversed 28mm lens trick to get a marco shot of the face of these little dudes. It'll be hard though not casting any shadows on the subject. Maybe I should just do the extension tube bit to get a little closer.

Thanks for the idea!

[Connie Star]

Nice set up- good ideas to try.

[ChasWG]

You really don't need the studio strobes to do this. A remote triggered hotshoe flash will do this to. I think in the set up photo you can see the sync cord coming out of the back of the strobe heading off to the camera. If you have a camera with a PC sync cord or a hot shoe to mount a shotshoe PC adapter and a flash with a PC sync port in it, then you are all set to go. The older Nikon flash unit (SB-24, 25, 26 and 28) all have the PC sync port. They are readily available on eBay all the time. That is more than enough power for this type of set up.

[Bloomin_Aussie]

Excellent results! To be honest I don't find my macro lens that useful in photographing flowers of this size. The closer you get, the smaller your depth of field so you end up losing detail on near and far parts of the flower. I find a standard range zoom much more helpful the majority of the time. With a camera like the 40D @ 10MP you can snap a shot from a fair distance then crop it down as needed while still retaining an impressive amount of detail.

[Ray]

When I have taken the time to do a serious "shoot" (rather than sticking the plant on my deck rail in the back yard), I use cheap 110V slave lights with built-in flash sensor (and a cable for direct triggering). They screw directly into any lamp-type socket.

Here's one from Adorama:

[Connie Star]

There is a technique I learned recently called "macro stacking" in which you take 3-4 images at slightly different focus points and use a program called combinezm that will put them together.
Generally as you increase the focal length of a lens you also decrease the depth of field so within some parameters it is roughly the same effect. One difference tho is lighting closely which is tricky. I use a prime 100mm macro, which amounts to 160mm on my Canon EOS XTi.
Here's a link to a macro-stacked phal I used light from the window on a lightly cloudy day.
http://www.orchidboard.com/community...-stacking.html

[Connie Star]

By the way, I love your shots!

[ChasWG]

The other way to do this is to use the zoom lens (in my case a a 70-200 f4 L) and I sometimes use my extension tubes. I have a full set of Kenko 12mm, 24 mm and 36mm tubes. I have also use an extension with a 1.4x TeleConverter with good results. The minimum focus distance of the 70-200 f4 L is only 1.3 meters. The extension tubes allow me to get much much closer, thus creating a larger inmage in the frame. Talk about a shallow depth of field though! I last used that technic while shooting water drops. I need more practice with that one, but a non-moving flower should be pretty cool. Add in Connie's focus stacking idea and it would be an amazing image!

Thanks Connie!