If you follow me on Instagram, you saw that E graduated from elementary school last Friday. Her school is huge. Over 1400 kids huge. 240 graduating 5th graders huge. To keep things running at a quick pace, 5th graders had to show up a little earlier to get organized. I took E and asked M to take V to buy flowers for her sister. It took some negotiation between M and V before she could choose something he found acceptable. White roses with some smaller purple flowers sprinkled through.
As is my habit when we have a bouquet in the house, I took pictures. The last few times with flowers, I was a little lazy. I’d read about using a ring flash to fill out the shaded areas when taking pictures of flowers but never tried it. I did it this time!
(I don’t have a comparison shot so you’ll just have to believe me when I say there were tons of shadows on the petals here.)
In fact, I pushed a little further with the ring flash. I’m usually in aperture priority mode. That’s when you set the aperture and the camera decides how long to expose. But with close ups, unless I have a huge amount of light, I always end up either with exposure times that are too long for me to hold steady or a very shallow depth of field. So here, I went with manual mode. I set a very short exposure to make sure camera shake wouldn’t be an issue. Then, I played with my aperture to get the result I wanted. The flash filled in the light so that my pictures weren’t totally dark.
I still did a fair amount of brightening in post process so I should probably have made the flash more powerful (it goes from -3 to +3 and I had it at 0). Still, I’m very excited about this! My first foray into manual mode!
Creative mommy at home to two wonderful little girls, trying to juggle family, sewing, exercise, family, knitting, photography, and did I mention family?
Deux souriceaux 
Beautiful! I love the first and fourth photos… and hurrah for learning new things!
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Thank you!
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