Tue 17 Jun 2008
A day when I was feeling completely stuck and frustrated led me to doing something different.
I was sitting and thinking about the camera gear I had and thinking of what I could do that was a bit different. I was actually considering lighting and decided to play. The idea was to light a flower from within. Now of course you can do this with fiber optics but I didn’t have one of those setups to hand. So what I did was to cut some holes and slits in some black cardboard, prop this up on books and place my flash unit under the card. So that I could both concentrate the light and limit its spread I formed a shield around the flash head and up to the card out of aluminium foil.
By creating various sized and shaped holes to match the shapes of the flowers and placing the flowers in or on the holes in different ways I could effectively pump light into the flower and actually use its structure to channel the light.
If you leave a gap in the cardboard the bright flash light will leak through and disrupt the shot.
The trick is to ensure that the holes cannot be seen by the lens or is even exposed so that the light will leak out.
Many of the above shots were taken with a Lensbaby lens.
You can see more examples of internally lit flower photography over on DIMi.