Orchid

We received two orchids as housewarming presents at the weekend and I decided last night to photograph one of them.  I had a specific look in mind – namely a nicely lit and well exposed orchid against a black background – and wanted to achieve this look without going into the studio.  At 10pm last night I took my bag of lighting gear down to the dining room, placed the orchid on a table and started my shoot.  One hour later I had the shot you see above.

I had no idea how to light an orchid – it was my first time photographing flowers in anything other than ambient light – so it was going to involve some trial and error.  I did at least know how to make a black background without using a black backdrop (which I didn’t have) and that was simply to ensure that no light fell on whatever was behind the subject.  In my case the background was the dining room wall which is painted a fairly light beige (Soft Hessian to be exact).

To keep this wall dark required killing the ambient light.  As it was 10pm when I started, by using a shutter speed of 1/250th second any aperture smaller than f/5.6 ensured that a photograph of the room produced a frame of total blackness.

Ambient light, RIP.

Next I tied down my camera position and subject position.  If I was to light the subject adequately but avoid light falling on the wall behind, I had to move the subject far away from the wall, so that was what I did first.  My camera position relative to the subject was dictated by the choice of lens (I opted for my 50mm fixed focal length as it is nice and sharp), and my desired composition – I wanted to include all the flowers, but not the base of the orchid.  This put my camera about 4 feet from the subject, and the subject was about 8 feet from the wall behind.

It was now time to add light.  The best advice I’ve seen on this is to add your lights one at a time, so this is what I did.   I decided to try a little rim light first to bring up the edges of the stems, and put my  SB-600 behind and to the left of the orchid with no modifier, and zoomed it to 85mm.  I liked the effect, but added a cardboard snoot to limit the cone of light even further.  This gave me a nice rim light on the stem of the orchid as desired, and also some of the light diffused through the petals to give a hint of soft light on parts of the flowers.  As a sort of rim light/fill light in one, this single SB-600 was doing the job of two.  A benefit of positioning it as I did was that it was pointed away from the wall, so my background stayed dark.

Next I added my main light – wanting to keep the harder look, I used my Lumiquest Softbox III mounted on my SB-800 and put it as close to the subject as I could without it being in the frame.  It was just off to camera left, and level with the orchid as I wanted to ensure that it was evenly illuminating the entire subject from the buds at the top to the bottom of the flowers.

In terms of power, I ended up firing both the SB-600 and the SB-800 at 1/64th power.  Note that the SB-800 is more powerful so it’s 1/64 power is probably equivalent to 1/32 on the SB-600.  I was reasonably happy with the results, but noticed some shadows on some of the petals that I thought I’d try to remove.

Not wanting to add any more front light, I decided to add a backlight high above the orchid and hoped the transparent diffusing effect of the petals would soften the remaining shadows.  I used a Justin Clamp to mount an SB-20 on the ceiling light that happened to be above and behind the orchid, and added another cardboard snoot to shape the light.  The SB-20 was further away than the SB-600, and firing at 1/16th power (as low as it goes).   You can see the setup shot on the right – the camera was mounted on the tripod shown in the shadows at frame right.  I’ve opened up the shutter speed to 1/15th second for this setup shot to allow some of the room to register.

To trigger all the lights,  I was using my Elinchrom Skyports radio triggers with the transmitter in the hot shoe of the camera, a receiver on the SB-600 (via a hotshoe-to-PC adaptor) and a receiver on the SB-20 (which has a PC connector), and the SB-800 in optical slave mode (SU-4).

The final shot required just minor post processing to slightly increase the contrast and give me the look I had envisaged.  I have no idea if this is even close to the “correct” way to light an orchid, but it worked for me, and has produced a final image that I really like.