Robert's Ramblings

I wanted to take a photo of the beautiful orange gerberas that Jennifer bought but I also wanted to do it in a way I have never tried before.

My aim was to create an image of a beautifully and evenly lit bloom in a perfectly black background (in the camera an not in Photoshop). To achieve this I knew I had to strobe light the flower as brightly as possible so that not only would all natural lighting be eliminated but also all the ambient reflected light from the strobe would also be so dim as to be eliminated.

This required three things, I had to get the flower as close to the lens as possible, I had to make the exposure as slow as possible and I had to use as much strobe power as possible.

After many attempts I almost gave up. When the strobe was very close the the flower was unevenly lit, when too far away or diffused the background was lit up in the image. What I needed was a macro strobe which is a circular ring of flash which circles the lens creating even light from all sides.

In the end I solved the problem by firing the strobe 4 times for the same image. Once from the left, the right, the bottom and the top. It worked so well I am looking forward to trying this technique in other challenging situations.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 122 - Happy Gee'.1/200 sec at 34mm f/22, ISO 200 + composite strobe