photo with black background

[sueste]

hello all,

Can anyone explain how do you take those very nice pics were the plant is lit in the foreground and all the background is black?

Is it photo editing or ??

thanks a lot

[snowballsarebad]

I'm no professional, but I've been successful with using a very bright light. Position the light close to subject, and shine directly on it, and leave the rest of room not so bright. Be sure to focus only on subject, and the camera will adjust to that amount of light needed to keep that subject in focus, allowing the background to darken. Attached is a picture I took doing this. Hope I helped!

[mayres]

Get yourself a nice big piece of black felt or other deep black materal to roll out for the background. Be sure to keep the black background a ways behind the subject or you can even get features from the black surface to potentially come into view. Yes, it can be done with photoshop as well, but easier and more accurate to just take the photo this way to start. Good luck - mike

[Anton]

Just expanding on what Mike said, make sure that the black cloth is fairly wide and high, because if it isn't, you'll get overshoot of the image and see the edges of the cloth.

It is a fine line to get the correct distance from the backdrop.

The other thing to help is to stand aways back and use the camera's telephoto lens to crop the flower in the view finder / screen and this helps eliminate image overshoot as well.

Have a look on my Web site:http://www.users.on.net/~op_ink/AD/Welcome.html and go to Dendrobium and look at the difference between images 14 & 16.

Image 14 was taken utilising the telephoto and image 16 was taken just using closeup. You will see that image 16 shows more of the background than image 14.

Hope this helps.

[sueste]

thank you all for the great tips

I'll try and will try to post here the result

[LLW]

If you look at the picture I have as an avatar you can see a picture that was taken using black fabric as a background. I took this picture of one of my Phals. using a big piece of black fabric as a backdrop. Considering I am not very handy with a camera I think it came out pretty good and it was easy. I have also used other colors behind my flowers to photograph them particularly when black did not make the flower stand out. LLw

[jerrymeola]

An additional trick when photographing with flash is to set the plant close to the plant (2-3 feet and reduce power on the flash) and have the background more than ten feet away. Set the camera at high speed shutter since the shutter speed means nothing to the flash and there will not be enough light reaching the background to show anything.

Retouching the background by 'burning in' the area with an editor like Photoshop improves the results with both techniques

[Ray]

If you're going to use a fabric background, go with velvet, as the nap tends to "eat" shadows better than most other textures.