Botanical Portraits - Daytime
More than just photographs of flowers, I believe that you may want to make botanical portraits – very detailed illustrations – of some of the more interesting plants in your garden. Here is what you will need to get started: tripod white, black or “sky” Bristol board diffuser reflector Sometimes, an illustration helps to explain things: and here’s the resulting image: Here is what it looks like without the background: You will need to carefully meter the exposure for the plant, and you may want to use a hand-held light meter, or a reference card (18% gray or white…) to manually set the correct exposure. Your in-camera exposure meter will be fooled by the background, so take some test shots to determine the best exposure settings for the plant itself. Here are a few more to show you what’s possible: Have fun!