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Most of us don’t have access to professional lighting systems but we do have various kinds of lights, such as table or desk lamps that can be used for some photography at home. Here is an experiment I did sometime ago recreated so that I can document it and publish it here.

If I am on your Flickr contact list you might have noticed that I once posted a photo of a lily that I said was shot at home with 2 table lamps and the TV as the background. This is the same experiment.

Stuff I used:

• A branch of orchids that I bought from Cactus flower shop (Rf 25)
• A plant that was growing in water
• A glass flower pot
• Camera (of course!)
• and Tripod (very important)
• 1 desk lamp (then added another later)
• LCD TV as the background. The other option is to use a black cloth that has no shine. I did try a black polo t-shirt but it was too worn out so the faded out material fibres reflected too much light.

Here is how the setup looked:

As you can see I had one lamp (white light) directly above my subject which is in front of our LCD TV which has a very low reflection surface. The camera is mounted on the tripod. If you mouse-over the above photo you can see how it looked without the flash. Yes, I had all the lights switched off because most of the room lights were tungsten.

I set the camera (my Canon 350D) to get the sharpest photo as follows:

• Enabled remote control (wireless / infrared RC4) shooting
• Enabled Mirror lock-up
• Disabled Image Stabilization on the lens
• I was using Aperture priority
• F: 8
• ISO 100
• Shutter speed: 1/6 sec
• Focal: 32mm

Result 1

Here is one of the shots from the setup above:

As you can see it is not very interesting. Now, I am not much of a flower-arranger so I wanted to make this look OK without doing anything with the flowers. So I used another desk lamp, this time one with a tungsten bulb, and pointed it at the base of the glass vase.

Result 2

This time the result was much more pleasing:

Of course, at this point I could have just finish the shoot and used some Photoshop magic on the photos to get something. But I still need something there. After a while it struck me: I need to spray some water on my subject and put more light from the bottom.

So I did and this time it came out perfectly. Here’s the image after I tweaked the colours in Lightroom:

Result 3

You might have noticed that I’ve carelessly sprayed the vase too in the process. I think it would have looked better without the vase looking wet.

Conclusion

If you are, like me, interested in macros of flowers and find that you cannot find unique flowers to photograph, then do what Scott Kelby says: go to your local flower shop and get a few flowers and shoot them at home. That’s what I did. The last time I went to Cactus the guy there gave me a lily for free because it was slightly damaged!

And if you have a tripod and a few desk lamps (or any direct light source) lying around the house then you can use it. The sharpness is quite impressive. Here’s the above image severely cropped to showoff some of the tack sharpness details:

Photography, for us hobbyists and aspiring students has to be something fun to do and in the end, while the technical rules are the same, what we do with those rules are our own invention. I hope you liked the article.

Thanks for reading!