A few days after the New Year, I went to a friend's home to show he and his
wife the basics of making macro-photographs of flowers. He has a studio
out of which he does weddings and portraiture, but he had never this type
of "still life" before. Mostly, his wife wants to do some artistic
work. The benefit was being able to play with his studio lights again and
I struck a deal that whatever I shot could be used in exhibition. :-)
Took the OM-1n which still had a half-roll of Portra 400NC in it (would
have liked to use 160NC but didn't have any), the extension tubes, and the
50/1.4, 85/2, 135/2.8 and 200/4 lenses. Turn out the flower his wife
wanted to photograph is and amaryllis in full bloom. These was not the
small house plant I was expecting; it stands almost 3 feet tall! [My other
half's idea of house plants are African violets.]
Rearranged his lighting from a "cross" setup with fill using three strobes
to a single strobe for a couple shots using "loop" and then changed it to
"Rembrandt" for a little more contrast. There was enough "bounce" from the
walls and ceiling that fill wasn't needed. Set up the tripod with an
extension tube on the 85/2 and got a frame-filling photograph of one
blossom on her amaryllis with the "Rembrandt" setup:
http://johnlind.tripod.com/amaryllis03b.jpg
Then came the unexpected . . .
I had the camera off the tripod to move it again for a different
perspective from a greater distance. One of their cats showed up in the
studio to investigate what was going on. Quickly pushed the tripod out of
the way and managed to get three shots of the cat before he decided he had
seen enough. Got this grab shot of the cat [color balance and print
exposure is off making working with the scan difficult; it needs to be
reprinted]:
http://johnlind.tripod.com/amaryllis01b.jpg
A few minutes later, their 18 mo. old son escapes the room he's been penned
into and he wanders in. I didn't know this beforehand, but his mother has
been teaching him to sniff flowers. He even does this now with pictures of
flowers! This enormous amaryllis is sitting on a short pedastal and the
blossom was just about his height. You guessed it; he wants to sniff the
flower and manages a good whiff about the time his mother gets hold of him
at the belt line to keep him from grabbing at the plant. Before he managed
to rip a part of a large petal off, I managed to get one more shot:
http://johnlind.tripod.com/amaryllis02a.jpg
At that point we declared a "break" for our model and allowed the plant to
return to its table in their kitchen.
The first one is a decent photograph, but you can bet I will use the second
(if it can be printed properly) and definitely the third one for
exhibition. Sometimes it's the unexpected that creates the best ones!!
-- John
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