Photographing Nature in Studio

Sometimes the best way to photograph something natural is indoors, using a studio setup. This kind of studio doesn't have to be anything fancy, although you do have to pay attention to light and exposure. Often, the setup for indoor still life photography of natural objects such as flowers, shells, and insects is pretty ad-hoc and jury rigged.

Case in point: the photos of a bouquet of rose below:

Rose Bouquet from Above, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

[Nikon D300, Sigma 50mm f/2.8 macro lens (75mm in 35mm terms), three exposures (1.6 second, 2.5 seconds, and 4 seconds), all at f/32 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

This is one of those photos that appears fairly effortless. As indeed it should. But in fact, the image took a great deal of work.

First, I used a sheet of gauze over my natural and incandescent light sources to give a soft lighting effect.

The most difficult problem was caused by an issue of lens focal length. I wanted to be able to see the entire circumference of the bouquet of roses; at the same time I didn't want the photo to capture tripod legs, lighting apparatus, or the edge of the black velvet background. With my tripod fully extended (three legs plus center column), approximately 40mm (60mm in 35mm terms) would have done the trick.

This would seem to have indicated my Nikon 18-200mm VR zoom lens, which I enjoy using as an all-round lens, and certainly includes the desired focal length in its range. Unfortunately, however, when you point this lens straight down, the zoom "slips" out to its longest setting, so I couldn't use the lens for this purpose.

I ended up raising the height of the tripod by putting each foot on a chair and climbing a short ladder myself. With a little cropping in the post-processing, my 50mm Sigma macro lens (75mm in 35mm terms) was now just right.

So that the white roses didn't blow out, and the orange and pink roses on the left remained vivid, I combined three different exposures to get the final result.

From another perspective, I photographed the bouquet of roses using somewhat harsher light on a black velvet background:

Bouquet of Roses, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR lens at 35mm (52.5mm in 35mm terms) with image stabilization turned off, 1.6 seconds at f/29 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

To get this effect, I used hard sunlight focused using window shades. In this kind of situation, it is important to underexpose relative to an overall meter reading, because you want the background to go completely black, and you want the flowers to appear as saturated as possible.

This whole setup for both flower photos was truly pretty jerry-rigged and rickety, and not at all the kind of slick shooting situation you'd expect of a pro photographer. But neither were as bad as the diaper boxes as a tripod mount I used to photograph this wasp:

Wasp, photo by Harold Davis. View the wasp larger.

[Nikon D70, 105mm f/2.8 macro (157.5mm in 35mm terms), 3/5 of a second at f/32 and ISO 200, tripod mounted.]

The wasp was torpid on our living room ceiling. It took some contortions on my part to get my tripod close enough to take this picture, as you can see in this photo Phyllis took of me in my pajamas photographing the wasp with my tripod raised up using the diaper cartons:

In these cases, the point is that the photos worked, and maybe that I didn't break my keister, not the slickness of the setup. You can truly take professional quality photos with little in the way of gear. It's worth saying one more time: people take photos, not cameras or fancy apparatus.