When Will I Ever Learn?
Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 9:07PM 
The wonders of creativity will never cease to amaze me. This image has been bouncing around in my head for a few weeks now. It took some time to figure out some of the details, but this is essentially what I have been seeing. I took some time today to work in the studio. This one had to be born but I thought, "just 1 set and them move on to the textures project". After the first set, roses started dancing around in my head as part of the setup. So off I go to our friendly neighborhood florist to buy some flowers. She usually has some older flowers she will sell me for a reduced price or sometimes even at no cost. So I picked up a dozen small roses and 3 others. Back home and several new photos were made using one of the roses.
The bottom line is, the idea began to grow and take on a life of it's own, as these things are want to do. So rather than a quicks set, it was an all day affair. But there is some good work that came of it.
The how was the interesting part. The image above was made using 2 lights, basically on opposite sides. Onr was a reflector with a diffuser on it, the other was a soft-box. The soft-box was used to soften the shadows and it was balanced so no secondary shadows were shown. I used the 120mm macro lens. But was unable to get the desired depth of field (DOF) when framing it like I wanted. I moved the camera back until the desired DOF was found at f/22 and shot it there then cropped to get the desired composition.
The photo below was shot with 3 lights. The first 2 were like in the photo above, but I added a small (100WS) slave strobe with a snoot on it to illuminate the blooms on the roses. It also was shot at f/22. The light setup actually would only provide enough light for f/22.
On some of the shots I stopped down a bit more and had to remove the diffuser from the light with the reflector before I could get enough light.
Considering finals are in < 2 weeks, these will probably be a part of the finals.
In looking at the necessary crops, the new enlarger will not do them without modifications. So now, do I modify it or use the old enlarger. Tough choice.
