I recently purchased a new orchid from Home Depot of all places (it was cheap!).  It was in full bloom, so I had to get some pictures.

My style with stills is typically to use either a black of white background.  This tends to emphasize the subject.  With the bright colors of the orchids, I felt white would be best in this situation.  In fact, white seems to be my favorite background color these days, as it gives a dramatic look.

I have a studio setup of three flashes and used all three in this situation (1 main, 1 fill, and 1 to light up the background).  The background flash is actually very important when you are using white if you truly want pure white.  If you don’t get the background lighted completely and with enough light, you can end up with an off-white versus pure white color.  The background flash also works to eliminate any shadows that may fall from the subject.  For the main flash, I used a fairly direct light (no soft box or umbrella) to provide contrast and pop and combined that with a soft fill flash to eliminate shadows.

For the camera, I used my Canon 5D Mark II digital camera mounted to my new Cambo X2-Pro with an 80mm Rodenstock lens.

Cambo X2-Pro

The Cambo lets you utilize typical view camera movements to change/correct perspective and enhance focus.  The camera’s  tilt capability is what produced the shallow depth of field (i.e. out of focus look) in the image.

I didn’t have to do a lot of editing to bring out the colors of the orchid, in fact the look is primarily the result of a film effect filter applied to the image.  In fact, I tend to apply film effect filters to many of my color images.  Why?  Film was not developed to accurately represent the colors we see, rather the color response of film was developed to produce images we would like.  That is one reason why many people don’t like the look of digital straight out of the camera – it is designed to faithfully reproduce the actual colors.  The problem with that is the actual colors are often dull and boring.  We tend to like more saturation and contrast, which is what film was designed to produce – what we like.  So if you want more interesting digital photos – get a film effect filter.  I use Nik Software’s Color Effex Pro which includes many other cool filters in addition to film effects.

Anyway, let me know how you like the image:

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