I've be wanting to practice shooting some flowers for a while now, but haven't had the opportunity. I usually try to take pictures in my Mom's garden, however her garden is currently 100km away an under about 15cm's of snow. Luckily, it's Valentine's Day and all of the local flower shops have a wide variety of flowers just waiting to be photographed. I picked out a selection and brought them home. Then came the fun part. Since I don't have studio lighting, it was time to improvise. I set the flowers up in front of a soft light source and added my flash to my camera. I've had many moments with that flash. Some good, some not so good, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of using it. After playing around with the flowers to get them positioned in a manner than I was happy with, I placed the bouquet next to one light source and angled my flash to 45degrees and used the pull-out reflector to bounce the light towards the flowers. I shot at f/11, 1/250sec, ISO 100 at 24mm. Using a shallow depth of field like f/11 allows me to make sure that most of the flowers will be in focus, where as if I were to shoot at something like f/4, there would be many more of the flowers that would appear blurry. Shooting a 1/250sec is pretty much the standard when using a flash, though I did get some interesting results by shooting at some slower and faster speeds while I was playing around. I think this shot came out pretty well, and the wonderful person who received the flowers seemed quite happy as well.
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