Daffodils in the Light of the SB-700

With the unusually warm spring, the flowers this spring started to bloom very early which affected my timing of taking photographs of them. It seemed like the wind was always too strong so I used this opportunity to take the flowers inside and shoot them in my basement using a flash.

I fastened the D90 to my Slik tripod to keep the camera steady and allow me to focus sharply on the daffodils. To get different perspectives of the flowers, I used the Nikon 18-105mm and 70-300mm lense along with the Sigma 50-150mm lense with Zeiko’s marco extension tubes. Shooting in RAW, I kept the ISO at 200 and used an aperture of f11 or f22 with manual focus.

The Nikon Speedlight SB-700 was set to manual mode which allowed me to adjust the flash power level to my liking to make the daffodil’s glow in the darkness. By moving the flash around, I was able to light up the flowers in a different ways along with the vase that the flowers were sitting in.

I processed the RAW files in ViewNX by changing the white balance to direct sunlight or incandescent if needed to adjust the color of the daffodils. The picture control was changed to either nature landscape or my new curve, golf course. To create the black and white images, the picture control was adjusted to MonoChrome curve that I created as well. The sliders on highlights/shadows were also adjusted.

Tiff files were created from the RAW’s and then moved into PSE8 for the final adjustments. I used the cloning tool to get rid of imperfections in the flower petals. With the flower vase visible on a few of the images, I wanted to make that a different color but keep the flowers unaffected. Using layer masks, I was able to bring in a new layer that was black and white and mask out the vase to be visible.

Hopefully this summer, there will be more opportunity to capture beautiful flowers.

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