Creative Floral Photography

I just wanted to share this video from Photographer & Author Harold Davis on how he shoots and processes his beautiful translucent flower photos: Creative Floral Photography with Harold Davis .

The video is produced in conjunction with Topaz Labs, however, the Topaz filters are by no means essential to achieving similar style photos to those showcased in the video. And the video covers most things pretty generically, rather than only going into detail on settings specific to the Topaz plugins. So you should hopefully still find it quite a useful and inspiring video even if you don't have access to the Topaz plugins.

But if you are interested in the Topaz filters, they currently have a sale on, offering 40% off their complete collection. Just use the coupon code SpingSummer2016.

To give a quick overview of Harold's process:

• Carefully arrange flowers on a lightbox to give a pleasing composition.
• The lightbox gives a bright background and shows transparency of the petals. Depending on the flower transparency, also light (or use a reflector) from the top to prevent solid parts of the flower being completely black.
• Take a range of exposures from very over-exposed to slightly underexposed.
• Manually blend the exposures together in Photoshop using layer masks.
• Duplicate the resulting image to a new layer several times to give layers that different effects can be applied to.
• Apply filters to the layers, typically one (or more) for softness, sharpness, and color. Use layer masks, blend modes, and opacity to reduce or localize the effect of each layer.
• Print, often on textured material.

I found the video very interesting, and I hope you will too.