Results of flower shooting in basement -- Please CC

jedirunner · Jan 21, 2012

Well, my 10 year old daughter (Brynley) and I bought some things at walmart to make a cheap (very cheap -- and it shows I'm afraid) lighting environment at home to try taking some pics of flowers (also bought at walmart) on a rainy day.

Here's some pics of the setup in the girls' bedroom in the basement:

Brynley's Best Shot
Brynley (shooting with a Canon PowerShot SX30-IS) ended up learning these things:

How to control her tripod and move it around to get the shot she wants
How to move the subject around to get a composition she likes

Here is her best photo for the day. I'm pretty proud of her results:

My Best Shots

As I'm very new to photography, my goals were:

Learn some more about manual mode and how the settings come together
Try out a somewhat controlled lighting environment and see what it's like
Maybe end up with 1 or 2 pics worth posting to get further suggestions.

I learned that I still have lots of work to do on focus, composition, lighting, etc.

Here are a couple of my best shots (CC Please!) shot with Canon 7D with 18-135 IS kit lens, using a ravelli tripod and shutter release. I'd have used my external flash (580EX II) but I haven't figured out wireless usage of it yet -- that's a future experimentation day:

1.

2.

There are a *LOT* of out-of-focus images, bad composition images, too-shallow DOF images (backdrop texture/coloring was too visible), etc. So, I post the best two I took, so that I can get CC and improve for the next session.

And yes, our lighting environment really was made of kitchen chairs, kitchen stools, the kids' lamps (bought at walmart today), white sheets tied to the chairs with elastics, a black backdrop hung over their TV.

If you missed the other times I mentioned it .... CC requested, desired, and welcome.

Thanks!

Kevin

CowgirlMama · Jan 21, 2012

Not bad for a ten year old! I like the third one. The middle one seems slightly over exposed to me.

Vtec44 · Jan 21, 2012

Tooo cute!! My daughter is 6 and I want to get her started ASAP.

jedirunner · Jan 22, 2012

Vtec44 said:
Tooo cute!! My daughter is 6 and I want to get her started ASAP.

It's certainly fun to have the daughter as a photo companion. Well worth the price of letting her pick out a programmable point and shoot. She won't read any photography books, and seems rather bored if I talk for more than a couple minutes about it, but if I email her links to rather short articles with good photos in them she will read it.

Kevin

greybeard · Jan 22, 2012

I love that you show us the setup prior to the shoot. Gives everybody ideas on how to set up this type of thing. I like all the photos. Only comment I have is that in #1 there isn't enought contrast between the seeds and the background. Maybe you can do something with this in post production. Looks like you are having a ton of fun.

Lbecker · Jan 22, 2012

Next time, give different perspectives a try. Out of the three I like the second.

jedirunner · Jan 22, 2012

greybeard said:
I love that you show us the setup prior to the shoot. Gives everybody ideas on how to set up this type of thing. I like all the photos. Only comment I have is that in #1 there isn't enought contrast between the seeds and the background. Maybe you can do something with this in post production. Looks like you are having a ton of fun.

Yes! We had tons of fun!

And now that the $10 bed sheets and $10 lamps are purchased, until I can get a *real* lighting setup, we don't have to buy those things again. ;-)

Yeah, we reviewed the photos after taking them and realized the seeds in most of our shots of that lily didn't have enough contrast against the black, so we went and re-shot with that in mind, and a hand-held mirror trying to get light reflected to where we wanted it, and that's how we ended up with #3.

Thanks for the comments,

Kevin

jedirunner · Jan 22, 2012

Lbecker said:
Next time, give different perspectives a try. Out of the three I like the second.

Yes, I think that different perspectives would be nice. I really like #2 as well, due to it just looking different from most of the shots we got. Brynley has a similar one from her camera, and she did more playing around with perspective than I did, to be honest. I'll keep that in mind for the next time we setup to shoot again.

Kevin