We see lots of shots of flowers, and as pretty as they are, the same old same old looking shots get a bit monotonous I reckon.
The Flower
OBJECTIVE:
I saw this small Royal Poinciana tree while walking a dog and was taken with the bright colours of the flowers in the vivid background of the greens. I immediately vowed to return with the camera and see if I could capture the beauty of the flowers.
When I did return it was late afternoon and the sun was streaming in from low in the sky which lit the flower up in some areas but created shadows in others. I decided to try to use some extra lighting to create something different here.
COMPOSITION:
The original photo is not as close as this as I don’t have close up filters or lenses. The composition we see here is from a crop in post processing. I did this to enhance the curvature of the flower over it’s stamen and feature the highlights from the lighting.
SETUP & SETTINGS:
1/400 – f10 – ISO 200. 70mm focal length. No filters on the lens. Handheld. Ext Flash on the camera and another ext flash handheld.
It was a bit tricky shooting this one handed while holding a flash off to the side and down low to create backlighting but that’s what I did. The sun was lighting up the flower from the top quite well so I set the on camera flash to very low. I only wanted it to trigger the slave flash in my left hand.
I chose to use f10 because I wanted to try to get as much of the flower itself in focus. Being zoomed in to the max for the lens I was using (a 24-70mm) meant I would lose a lot of that depth of field I wanted.
POST PROCESSING:
Some selective sharpening on the white section and stamen ends. Cropping to create the composition from a larger version.
END RESULT:
The result is pleasing for me as the slave flash has created a bright, lime coloured bokeh (out of focus background) that otherwise would have been dark. The low angle of the slave flash also created highlights on the stamen stalks and under the main petal that the sun wasn’t finding. This brought out the texture very well that the on camera flash would have flattened.
Can you explain what slave flash is and how it works…I have no idea on how to use flash other than when it is connected to the camera.
Much appreciated.
A slave flash is one that is triggered by another flash or device for that purpose. So in this case I had an external flash mounted normally on the camera and set to ‘master’ and another flash in my hand set to ’slave’. When the ‘master’ goes off it triggers the ’slave.’ By angling the head of the ‘master’ away from my subject the ’slave’ was able to dominate the lighting.