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Last week one of my friends approached me to ask if I would like to take pictures for a competition she was entering. She is a talented florist called Amanda Coghill who runs her business from her shop at the bottom of Dempster Street in Wick, Caithness – Amanda’s Creative Florist.

I don’t normally take photographs of the people of Caithness, so this was an exception. I do have an interest in lighting though, and this was a good opportunity to get the Speedlites out and take some potentially interesting photos.

In the relatively small confines of the shop we set up an improvised studio, utilising a dark grey wall for a backdrop. I set up the Lastolite Ezybox Hotshoe softbox with a Canon Speedlite 430EX II on a boom stand camera left and as high as possible. I was positioning it high as the size of the “studio” meant that the model was going to be positioned close to the wall, and I wanted the shadows falling from her to be projected as low as possible in the shot. This worked, mostly.

In terms of camera kit, I opted for the Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0 L USM on my Canon EOS 5D MKII.

A few quick test with the light meter and I was almost ready to go, but this was one of those types of shots where colour accuracy was vastly important, much more important than creativity on the photographer’s part, so taking a reference shot with an 18% grey card each time I changed the lighting was pretty important. Editing later in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is much easier when you have a solid 18% grey reference! If you’re looking for 18% grey cards the Photocritic White Balance Gray Cards Set is a nice place to start, with the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport being the choice of professionals.

After careful placement of the flowers by Amanda I started clicking…

This is my hero shot, and considering I don’t do this often I am quite happy with it! :)