Mist of a Flower

My first photo idea for tonight was to do a picture of my bike. I did a big ride today, and so I thought it could use some recognition. But then the weather went to crap rain and I had to change plans. Out of the corner of my eye I saw this really vibrant, interesting flower.

Also listening to a French song with "Vodka" in the title....Spotify, why you so random?

Anyway, I grabbed this cool looking flower (which was a potted plant) and stuck it up on a table. My first attempts at photos were with a macro adaptor lens. They looked really soft and pretty cool, but they just weren't doing it. I switched over to just the 50 and tried a few angles...but still no.

When this kind of repetitive failure to get a good photo starts to happen, it's really important to keep shooting. Eventually, you will figure out that perfect angle and lighting that you want. But it takes a lot of mistakes and trials to get there. That's the beauty of photography, the only way you are successful is to find the ways that don't work, and then deduce the correct way from those failed attempts. I almost never, ever, have a very clear image of what photo I want to take. I just have a subject and then I build the photo around that. Trying to build a subject around a photo is really difficult and not that fun most of the time. Doing things the other way around is all about experimenting and just trying stuff until you get something cool!

So tonight, after the many failed photos, an idea suddenly popped into my head. I grabbed my two strobes and put them right under the flower to under light the crap out of it. I set my camera to f22, 1/200, and ISO100 to cut out all ambient light. With the strobes so close to the subject, I didn't need much power to light them.

At first, I shot straight down. Nope. not cool at all. Then I tried shooting parallel to the ground. Perfect. After tweaking the lights around a bit, I had a wonderful shot of the flowers. I had set the camera to monochrome as well. But there was still something missing. The flowers were just...flowers. They needed something to make them alive...but what?!

Water, of course!

I grabbed the hose, set it to mist and started spraying away. At first, there was wayyyyyy too much droplets in the air. To correct this, I sprayed a bit above the flowers to let the mist dissipate a bit. By this time, my parents got home, and my mom was kind enough to spray  the mist while I took the picture. It's much easier that way than to set a timer and try to time the spray with the shutter release.

Thanks mom!

For editing, all I did was crop. That's it.

See you tomorrow!