Red strobed flowers

Taking a picture with strobes can be somewhat challenging with the setup that you have to the right.  What we have here are two primary colors, red and blue, with slightly different tones that need to come out well saturated.  I’m doing this indoors, so I don’t want the light to be quite as harsh as I did last time, so I’ll use a softbox.  How am I going to set this up so that the background recedes and the flowers are well saturated?

A few things.  First, I need to keep the lighting on the flowers delicate.  They’re already pretty bright, so they don’t need a lot of light.  Too much, and the colors bleach out.  I also need them to be brighter than the background – the background is actually a mid-to-light blue color (my daughter’s lunchbox, in fact).

So I start by exposing f/stop wise where I think I’ll need it for the light.  f/11 or so.  Then I adjust shutter speed while exposing for the background, aiming to hit -1EV for that guy.  Flash with softbox is perched to camera left, set on manual (14 mm spread) at 1/32nd power.  Blinds it out on the petals.  Move it down in third stops until it stops bleaching out: 1/64 even is the flash.  Try slightly smaller and larger f/stops, find f/11 is still the best.

That’s all there was to this.  These petals are from the www.moosestooth.net parking lot (my daughter snagged them).  I did the full setup, shooting and teardown in 20 minutes – her bath.