Photographing Flowers

I spent a fair part of yesterday photographing an orchid indoors. Nothing directly to do with the Course but I had been asked to do it so I though Why not!

I had plenty of warning so I thought about what was the most important thing to achieve. I came to the conclusion that it was the colour of the flowers. This was doubly important because the person receiving the photograph would have the actual orchid to compare with the produced image. I therefore needed some means of ensuring that the image taken properly reflected the colours of the plant. I decided to use an early Christmas present - a ColorChecker. Using this card the software that accompanies it produces a camera profile accurate to the light source at that time. The profile is available in the Camera profile menu of Camera RAW in Photoshop.

I  wanted an even light and did consider using diffused flash. However on the day I was fortunate in so far as the light in the room was just about perfect. It was an overcast day but the snow covering outside reflected a really good light indoors so I went with the available light. Using a tripod I used an aperture (f4 and f2.8) that gave me the desired depth of field. I also used a remote control to minimise any camera shake.

The flowers of the orchid were predominantly 'white' with a wide range of tonal differences with some hints of a very soft violet/purple. Only the centre of each flower had colour being variable but subtle tones of yellow.

I took two shots with the colorchecker in the frame and then approximately 20 of the plant itself. I used one of the shots including the colorchecker to establish the profile and then applied that profile to all the images within Camera RAW. Checking the images I found that there was a definite, albeit subtle, change in the colour rendition of each image and that the accuracy of the colours was very high. I carried out the usual enhancements whilst in Camera RAW before creating .psd files of the best six.

On this occasion I did not have to make the final choice as the person requesting the photograph was available and so the choice was made by her. I then printed off the requested images using the finest photograph printing on my printer (2880dpi and 'fine detail'). The client was delighted with the result.

Lessons learned:-

•  I found myself using the workflow approach, although I did not write it down, starting by setting the objective and then working through each step to achieve that objective. On this occasion there were time constraints because the shoot and printing had to be completed within one day.
• The use of the colorchecker was a boon because I could be certain that the white balance was right and that the colours were accurate speeding up the process considerably.
• I was also very conscious of the power of the software that allowed me to transfer the image in the camera and create the final product. I wanted to create something that was both artistic and 'real' and the ability to crop the image to have the 'best' part of the plant and to add text (the name of the plant) along with the usual enhancements helped me to achieve this aim.