Upsy Daisy

Gerbera, originally uploaded by andyskelton-a Blog a day http://andrewskelton.net.

I’ve wanted to take this photo for absolutely ages, isolate and highlight the beauty of the Gerber that resides on our kitchen windows. I have tried before, and you may well have seen the results on Flickr, but I’ve not been happy with the photos. With the studio lights, and the portable studio, I have no excuse, and as I couldn’t come up with a suitable reason why I couldn’t take the photo I persevered and hey presto the shots just popped on to the memory card.

Actually, it was pretty easy but there are a couple of “gotcha’s”; firstly, whilst my camera and flash can, through some jiggery pokery take photos above the limitation of the shutter ie above 1/250second, the studio flashes don’t play ball quite the same way, and so you have to use 1/250s or slower. This then affects the aperture and ISO that can be used – I ended up using f8 which doesn’t really lend itself to creative photography but does mean you can get more of the flower in focus. Secondly, where as with hi key photography where you can use two lights at a comparable hight to illuminate the subject, the flower really needs one of the lights (the one that should act as the key light source) to be up high illuminating the flower head, whilst move the other light down low to illuminate the stem and lower flower head.

Actually I’ve just thought a way around the slower shutter speed – I can use a 5th flash unit, my flash gun, which can be fired at any speed such is the sophistication of the unit. Well, I think it’s sophisticated, I took one look at the manual when I bought it and immediately put it to once side to be read on a rainy day. Despite England having had terrible floods since,so much so that our village was cut off, with all roads to where we live being so flooded not ever 4×4 could get through.. this still wasn’t a rainy enough day for me to go back to the flashgun’s instructions!

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