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!