Orchid petals

The apartment I got when moving down to München had this orchid plant standing in the window. After giving it a minimum of water, it rewarded me with the most interesting flowers, of which I of course had to take pictures.

The mouth of the flower, while the most colorful, turned out to be hard to make a good composition from. Instead I looked to the petals, which have a veined-ness that is frequently overlooked. I took this with an on-camera flash bounced off a hand-held small bounce (the walls in that apartment had a color cast). Took me some tries to get one where the veins were really accentuated.

Part of the reason for bouncing was to make sure the shadows from the other petals were nice and soft, as it was more or less impossible to not include them. The black background is intentionally made by placing a black office chair there.

Notes from online videos

I watched a couple of videos while eating lunch, and took some things away from them that I need to remember - and in particular that I want to remember for this afternoon's photo walk.

From this video, I got some tricks on natural light portraits:

• Have the subject look towards open sky, to get the reflection in the eyes.
• Be in the shade
• Have a natural reflector (typically a big building) nearby.

I want to find some places that are good for this, fortunately we have a lot of massive buildings in München with open space around them.  I want to find out if I can get a strong studio-like side light by being close to a reflector, and if working in full sunlight works if right next to a reflector. I also want to find a couple of readily accessible places that are good for this, and note at which time of day they are best. I didn't care too much for the flatness of his light, though, so I'll have to see if being a bit more extreme in the lighting is better.

From this one, I learned mainly to watch out for light coming up from the ground, but also that columns are useful for portraits - and we have a few of those around here. I like how he has a little cloth-covered set -- not for an 8x10 camera, but for his laptop. It would be fun to make a set-up that looks like a classical camera, but is actually a laptop used as a "viewfinder", something like on the right, but preferably a little more steam-punk as well.

This one told me that I need more reflectors - especially adding the last one made a huge difference. But also the little things like straightening the elbow, adjusting the hair and clothes, and turning the fingers -- these are the kinds of things I never think of looking for.