Creating Back-lit Flower Photos

A couple of days ago I accidentally pulled out a part of a pansy plant from a container garden. Not wanting to throw the cheerful flower away, I trimmed it and placed it in a tiny vase that I keep on my kitchen windowsill. Today it looked lonely all by itself in it’s vase, so I picked 3 more pansies to place in my other 3 tiny vases. Then I started playing with creating back-lit photos of the flowers, just for fun.

Sometimes you can get interesting soft color in the outside background, when shooting photos in front of a window but other times the variation of color in the background outdoors can be distracting.

While the outside light was bright today, there were gradations in the light that were distracting so I moved the vases onto a table in my office and put a translucent round diffusion panel between the flowers and the window light to get a clean bright white background.

Here are some tips for creating bright back-lit shots like this:

• Make sure that you are setting exposure manually or use spot metering, with the spot you are metering over one of the flowers (not the bright background). I like to expose 1-2 stops over what the camera thinks the exposure should be to compensate for the the bright background light.
• Make sure you have sufficient depth of field to get the entire flower in focus.
• When you edit the photograph, bring the highlights down as far as you can in your editing tool, and bring the shadows up. This will help you bring out the detail in the flowers and make the background bright, but not overwhelmingly bright.
• Using a round diffusion panel between the window light source and the back of the flowers eliminates background distractions and creates a clean bright white background.
• Try using flowers with translucent petals for even more delicate interest in the photograph.]

Tomorrow is the opening for an exhibit of photographs made my members of the Crosstown Camera Club at the Edina Art Center.  I have 2 photos in this exhibit.

The variety and quality of the prints in the exhibit is truly impressive. I feel quite humbled by the talent of my fellow club members. If you like photography and would like to stop by, I plan to be at the opening from 5 – 8 pm.