Its definitely time for another post on the blog, another photo for a wall only this time its not ours but my mother in laws.

This is the flower we brought her for mothers day and thought it would be a great idea to give her a print of it for her birthday.

So a quick easy picture was in order, as it happens quite often, I had a picture in my mind already of how I wanted the image to look, I knew I wanted a dark black background, I wanted the picture to be taken full length and shot side on (i.e. not looking down on the flower head for example)

I started by rolling down our bedroom blind over our washing basket and placed the flower on it. I set up a tripod and camera with a cable release and chose to use a 60mm Macro lens (mainly for its sharpness) I then got out a flash and held it with one hand with the cable release in the other making it easier to move the flash around the subject, above, below, in-front and behind checking the LCD screen each time to make sure I was getting the exposure correct ect, it was a very crude set up but it worked.

THIS image should give you a better idea of the set up....





This was one of those times where you get everything set up, dial in the flash power and aperture ect and take the first picture and smile to yourself because the first frame is exactly what you had in your head, I do love it when that happens :)

The exposure was f/11, flash power set to 1/8th from memory. My one and only snag was that the light from the flash was occasionally hitting the background which was actually a dark blue so this was spoiling my black background look, so a quick fix was to put together a make-shift flag out of card and put in on the side of my flash then secure it with an elastic band, this worked a treat and kept the light from straying onto my home-made backdrop and kept everything black.

In photoshop it was just a matter of cleaning up a few stray leaves at the bottom of the image using the paint brush tool and zooming to check detail.

Quick, easy and, I think effective.

As all ways any questions or comments stick em below.