Quote:
Originally Posted by Island Girl
Wow! The color and patterns are just fabulous! They are so bold, and wonderful!! Pictures are lovely as always 
...you should do a "how to" for orchid picture taking, how u set up - background, and lighting  I would LOOOVVVE to know how to do this as well as you do (could prob figure out how to basically do it, but helpful tips would be very nice  ) my only problem is where to find black velvet fabric (we don't have fabric stores around us anymore... They've all closed up w/in the last 10-15 years  sad, especially for being the "Textile Capitol" this area is known for) |
I'm lucky for lighting, my living room as a big window each end, and it also has two light fittings in the ceiling, one towards each end. There used to be 5 x 60W bulbs in each fitting (total of 500W accross the two fittings) but we now use the low energy equivalents but it should be a similar amount of light).
I take the photos in the middle of the room between the two light fittings. Day or night the light just seems great for photos with nothing extra special. The only problem has come sometimes when the TV is also playing and that can cause sequential shots to have completely different lighting... simple to just turn it off though
For a backdrop I have bought a backdrop sepcially designed for the purpose. It's one of these, but might be a different make of the same thing.
PhotoSEL BD113WB Reversible White & Black Collapsible: Amazon.co.uk: Camera & Photo
It folds down small slides behind the sofa when not in use, and we just use something to prop it against the front of the sofa to hold it upright when we use it.
And the rest... well hubby and I tend to work on the photos together, we have a 100mm Macro Lens on a Cannon 60D body. We connect up to a computer and adjust focus, depth of field etc on the computer so we can see how the picture will look on a big screen. We both suggest what needs changing, in framing, focus, depth of field, exposure and angle of the flower.
The hook up to the computer also helps because the living room is not massive and for a big flower like this the camera is right back against the fireplace to fit the flower in over by the sofa... so you can't see through the view finder anyway. (Obviously for some shots we switch to a different lens with a bigger field of view
)
Then it's really a matter of knowing the camera and knowing how to get what you want from it. Hubby is pretty good at that
We work on the Av mode of the camera which means we set the aperture (which controls depth of field) and it adjusts the exposure itself, we then have an 'exposure bias' setting that allows us to tell it to adjust the exposure up or down from what it would usually aim for. It's slightly easier than trying to go fully manual.
Linear Mode
