At 12:41 PM 7/20/2004 -0400, Eliot wrote:
>Prem
>
>Great pictures
>
>Could you describe your lighting and background setup and equipment
Hi Eliot,
You can see more of my photos here:
http://www.premdesign.com/orchidpics/orchidpicshq.htm
my setup is pretty simple. I use a piece of black cloth (usually) as
the backdrop draped over my kitchen cabinets, although I have used a
light grey when a flower has dark floral parts that would get lost in
the black. For light, I leave the overhead fluorescents on in the
kitchen (this provides some fill lighting) and use a 500 watt quartz
halogen worklight as the primary light source. I may also throw a
60 watt desklamp into the shaded areas to brighten up the shadows
a little more. I have recently gone to putting a diffuser in front
of the worklight, made of a glass cutting board that has been scored
heavily with sandpaper. Using the worklight allows me to see
exactly what I'm going to be photographing, as opposed to a flash,
which is only on for the instant that the subject is being photographed.
For work in the field with natives, I use a piece of black foam core
board, tilted in such a way that it is self-shadowing behind the
subject.
The camera is a Sony Mavica MVC CD400 4 megapixel camera on a tripod.
I'll play with all sorts of angles of the flower relative to the
light source and bracket my exposure, starting from purposely
underexposed and going to purposely overexposed. I then go through
all my shots and pick the best exposure where the highlights are
not blown out and the backdrop is reasonably invisible. I will
then edit the photo for exposure, making sure that the levels take
the backdrop to pure black, the highlighted areas are near-white,
and the gamma is adjusted reasonably so shaded areas are not too
lost with the background. I may also adjust the color balance a
little to more truly match the colors that I photographed. I've
found that if you set the white balance setting properly on the
camera, this step is needed only minimally.
And that, in a nutshell, is my photography setup. I know it
sounds very cobbled-together, but it seems to work well for me.
---Prem
www.premdesign.com
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