Autumn in the Studio

After three straight posts of travel photos it is time to return to more creative photography.  In the spirit of the 52 photos project I challenged myself to arrange and photograph a studio shot for the fall season.  We picked up some interesting pumpkins at Wegmans, gathered some leaves from the yard (there were plenty to choose from) and I added some fall flowers to come up with this week's shot.   I played around with moving things and relocating some lights but I found what worked best was a single strobe and a  reflector.  The shot above did contain a second light off to the left that adds a bit more depth to the picture.  The backdrop is a curtain of black velvet that Amy made for me to use for this sort of thing.  If you want to take studio shots where the background is pure black, then there is no better material to achieve this with than black velvet.  Its an expensive way to go but the results speak for themselves.  This particular shot was taken with my D750 and my Nikkor 70-200 mm zoom at a focal length of 125 mm, f9.0 and ISO 400 (my strobes are not very powerful).

I then switched to my 105 mm macro lens for some alternative shots.  Before going in close I rearranged the pumpkins a bit, got rid of the flowers and took the shot here.   The stem on the one is interesting and the cream colored gourd is set to lean on the bigger pumpkin to try and add some interest to the shot.  Its OK but I still like the larger scene above better.

I next figured out how to suspend a single leaf in such a way so I could photograph it against the stark black background for  dramatic solo leaf picture.  The result was not too bad.  My leaves were in the studio (aka basement) for  few days before I had the time to go down and actually play around and they had dried out quite a bit.  I tried lighting the leaf solely from the back and capturing based on what light was transmitted through the leaf.  I think this would have worked better with a freshly fallen leaf instead of the drier ones I was dealing with.

Last, I wanted to do a close up of one of the flowers in the bouquet in a similar fashion: alone against the blackness.  I reverted back to the technique of focus stacking that I described in a previous posting to get the depth of field needed for this particular flower.  This shot is composed of four separate exposures that were taken with very slight changes in the focus point.  When shooting macro the depth of field is very narrow and this technique is one way to increase the depth of field and get more of the subject to be in focus.  All the frames were shot at ISO 100 and f9.0 using the 105 mm Macro lens.