velvet rain

Last November my wife was given a bouquet of flowers from a friend. It was a lovely bunch of flowers but one flower in the bunch seemed to to be drawing my eyes to it more than any of the others and that was the Iris. So much so that I thought that it would be the ideal flower to try out my new Meike 60mm f2.8 macro lens.
I removed the single iris and put it in a small jug and sat it on our dining room table. I set up my OM Systems OM-1 camera on a tripod and attached my Meike macro lens. I sprayed the flower with water to give it the appearance of raindrops on the petals. If I’m being honest I was quite disappointed with the early results as the background looked too busy and was distracting. So I decided to deliberately underexpose the image to completely darken the background and used my Nissin i60 flash off camera to highlight the flower. After many shots tinkering with the power settings on the flash and placing the flash in different positions I eventually got some images that I was really happy with.