Pixiq

Tree peonies are large blousy flowers that are short-lived in hot weather. I must have photographed them dozens of times; but when I passed several blooms on one plant in our garden on my way to clear out dead stems from our pond, I could not resist a quick shot. The plant was growing beside some steps, so I grabbed a camera with a macro lens and exposed several shots by hand-holding the camera whilst balancing precariously on the steps.

Looking at the frames under the shade of a tree, I could see they were no more than record shots of a flower in strong sunlight. I decided to cut one flower so I could have more room to work around it on a lightweight table I use on the lawn. To even out the light and remove the harsh shadows, I used a Lastolite Tri-grip diffuser. But by late afternoon the petals had begun to close up over the floral parts inside, so there was no option but to use the diffuser plus a Nikon SB-900 speedlight with a Honl Traveller 8 Softbox to soften the fill flash. By this time, I wished I was an octopus because I needed at least three arms – one to hold the diffuser, one to handhold the speedlight off camera and a third to trigger the shutter.

This meant opening up my studio to get another tripod to support the speedlight. My speedy two-minute shot had by now extended to over half and hour, but the result was an improvement on the initial grab shot.

 As the petals closed even tighter, I left the peony in a vase inside overnight. After it opened out the next day, I used window light in a sunroom with the SB-900 speedlight and the Honl Softbox as a fill once again. Without wind, a smaller aperture could be used to gain greater depth of field. As I changed the format from vertical to horizontal, I also varied the position of the center of the flower.

Each lighting set-up portrays the same flower in a different way. Soft light renders the petals in a subtle three-dimensional version that is most restful to the eye.

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The crown Imperial lily produces a stately 3-5 feet high flowering spike earlier in the spring.  A cluster of flowers at the top hang down and inside the bottom of each flower there are six large nectaries, which I needed to take for a book. The potted plant was placed on a table and a 'skirt' of aluminum foil encircled the stem out of shot to bounce light back into the flowers.

By using a low camera angle with a macro lens, a single catchlight from the speedlight was reflected back from five of the six shiny convex nectaries in a similar way direct light creates highlights in convex eyes.

The moral of these two senarios is that if a flower is worth shooting, it is worth spending time exploring the best possible lighting – which does not need to be flashy or expensive – before the flower fades and the petals drop. Who says flowers are easy?!