Recently I bought a 5 million candle power torch for photography. The intention was to use it to ‘paint’ nighttime photos. However today I thought I’d try it out to light a boquet of flowers.
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This shot was taken of a single rose in a pint glass. In order to get the dark background you just need to have a distant background and ensure that the torch is only lighting the target. The brighter the target is the darker the background will be. 109mm lens at f/11 to get some depth of field on the flower. A shutter speed of 1/10s is enough to show the flower well lit with the bright torch but not enough to being out any features in the background. |
| Leaves have a very detailed structure that is easily missed when photographing them when they are lit from the same direction as the camera. To bring out the detail this leaf was lit from behind. 41mm f/14 1/6s. This is a detail from a larger photo, but as you can see the depth of field (even at f/14) wasn’t enough to show the whole leaf in focus. I didn’t throw the background into darkness this time, the background is just a white t-shirt! |  |
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I used a slightly differn’t approach on this more usual shot. Most of the light in this shot is natural light from a nearby window. Just the tip of the flower was lit by the torch. A couple of birthday cards placed in front of the torch helped block bright light hitting the leaf. 3/10s f/11 50mm. |
A macro lens would have really helped with this project! However I think I got decent results with a combination of regular 18-50 and telephoto 70-200 lenses.