I have a newly budded orchid..what's a good background and lighting to take a nice pic of it?

As has already been suggested black can be very effective unless the orchid is a dark shade. Keep the background a distance from the subject so it will be well out of focus and try to keep light off it, this gives an 'infinite' black. The alternative is to deliberately to put a spot of light (I use an old 35mm projector) directly behind the flower this will put a 'halo' around it vignetting to black, if the orchid is white it can get lost in the glow which is the only downside to this technique, but you can colour the light with gelatin slides or even old B%26amp;W filters on the projecting lens, yellow works well. By having several feet from the subject to the background you have room to alter the shape of the light pool by moving the spotlight (projector) around and even using crude apertures cut into cardboard for the shape you want.



I prefer to use a diffuse continuous light for macro shots like this as you can see where shadows are cast and position a white reflector ( a piece of white card or even paper) to lighten them, don't eliminate them all together they help with 'modeling' and giving the third dimension to the form of the flower.



I think you are well aware of the limited depth of field available when you shoot macro and you really want all the flower in focus, which can be a problem with some types of orchid, so it's small aperture and long exposures, or bright lights, in professional studios they often 'pump' 500W or more light into a small area so they can have small apertures with reasonable shutter times, the heat is something to watch with flowers though.



If you have a DSLR you can mix different colour temperatures of light then calibrate the camera's white balance which is the way I work (I keep forgetting to reset it, but that's another story LOL) Look in the manual as every camera is slightly different to set up, if the flower is white you can use that to 'calibrate' the white point.



Chris

I have a newly budded orchid..what's a good background and lighting to take a nice pic of it?
A shallow depth of field and diffused natural light would be nice

http://www.flickr.com/photos/perki88/233...
Reply:Black Background would give contrast colour and I don't like to use studio lighting, I prefer to use Lightsphere with white cover,because lightsphere will not giving too strong shadows.Let try it now,good luck to you.