Floral and Scenic Photography for Students – Part 3:

Floral and Scenic Photography for Students -Part 3

All of my Mentees from Westlake High School.

Regarding Floral and Scenic Photography for Students, Some of my male students roll their eyes when I suggest shooting floral, including natural light as well as lighted still life and light painted floral arrangements. However they quickly realized how complicated it can get when we get into lighting and light painting arrangements. Chloe and I hung this orchid cluster from a cross bar and painted it with a flash light over about a 10 second exposure and then we masked in the spot lit areas in Photoshop.

Eleana and I drove to the Austin Botanical Gardens to photograph water lilies in natural light. The sun was just low enough to cast the edge of shadows to give this lily a bit of POP. In photoshop we duplicated the base layer and changed the blend mode to soft light. We duplicated it again and change the blend mode to multiply. Then we selected the flower, reversed the selection and masked in a water and lily pad background from a different shot.

 

The reason I like roses and orchids so much is because the petals are translucent, so they let light through them. This make them prime candidates for back lighting. This rose that Morgan and I photographed, is a great example. There is no front light. It was lit only from behind. You can see the flashlight Morgan was holding behind the rose in the first shot.

I introduce my students to the different rules of composition early on. In this Gerber Daisey photograph, we used one single flash with a soft box on the right. Morgan did a great job of cropping the images so that the flowers fell perfectly into the 45 degree rule.

 

Nolan and I also photographed some blue orchids. This image is a combination of 3 different front spot lighted areas and two backlit areas. He did a great job of honoring the rule of thirds when he did his final crop.

And one more Orchid arrangement with Krishan. He also did front and back lighting and masked in spot lit areas to create his master image.

Nolan and I attempted to emulate the still life floral style of Paulette Tavormina. I shopped at Central Market for the props, and my wife Samantha Stevens carved out some time from her Austin based job coaching day and built this gorgeous arrangement. Actually there is very little editing in this final image, just a couple of spot lit area on the right that the key light on the left could not reach.

 

One of my favorite locations for introducing my students to landscape and scenic photography is the Pennybacker Bridge over Lake Austin. It is iconic, and the students always have something special to print up and take home with them. With Elena and Jake, the lesson involved learning how to evaluate a panoramic scene, leveling the camera to shoot 5 or 6 bracketed exposures and overlaping each shot so that Photoshop would be able to merge them all together into one scene. Here is what they came up with. Elena was delighted when friend of mine offered to pay her $100 for a 30 inch print of her panorama.

Morgan and I photographed a City-scape of Austin. You can tell that this was a few years ago – 2014 to be precise because the Frost Bank Building is featured and visible. Today, it is hard to find an angle where you can see any of that building.