Fresh Ground Photography

If you can shoot Tulips …

I love flash photography. Sure, I do enjoy setting the ISO, aperture and shutter speed when taking a photograph of a landscape, but what I really love is controlling the light on a more intimate subject as well. And you can’t beat tulips at this time of the year, they have a rounded similarity to the human form. Also tulip flowers have a subtle range of hues and colours, with simple, well-defined shapes to their leaves and petals.

I use an Elinchrom setup for most of my studio work. These pictures were taken with a single Elinchrom D-Lite Rx4 light with a translucent-covered octobox modifier. In the image shown to the right here, I positioned the softbox towards the ceiling in order to diffuse the the incident light. I like the simple uni-directional light that this setup provides. And I also like the deep blacks in the background.

As far as the camera is concerned, I used a 24-105mm zoom on my Canon 5D MkIV with an aperture of f/11 and a shutter speed of 1/160 at an ISO of 200. To be honest, this is my standard setup when shooting flash. The deep depth of field at f/11 gives me a lot of leeway in focussing and the ISO and shutter are managed by the flash itself.

So these are some photographs of old flowers: a bunch of tulips that were bought a week or so ago. I wanted to capture their beauty, even though they were past their prime. There is a purity in their texture; in the story that led to what they are now.

For the image shown to the left here I used a 300mm lens with settings of 1/160s and f/11 at 200mm.

But, you know, if you can take pictures of tulips then you can take pictures of people.

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