52 Weeks - Week 6: "Flowers"

This week has been all about photographing flowers, and to try and avoid another post with the excuse that I was too busy, I have made a bit of an effort here!  Unfortunately, it's been more in the taking and processing of images than the pruning, so there may be a bit of an overdose, but hey, at least it's better than the last couple of weeks.

I generally take at least one camera pretty much everywhere, and I've been really enjoying my Sigma 50mm f1.4 on the 5Dmk2 recently, so when we went to a garden centre, I took a few shots there:

This is a bit of a cheat as I've already done a post about the bluebell woods at Pamphill, but they were taken in the "Flowers" week, so I think I'm sort-of allowed to repost them here:

My mother absolutely loves gardening and flower arranging, and she had made an absolutely beautiful arrangement of flowers which I took a shot of (again, this was with the 50 f1.4 at f1.4 - probably should have had the DoF a bit wider...)

But I wanted to make an effort with this topic.  My daughter picked the theme for this week, along with the comment that it gave me a chance to "buy Mummy some flowers", so off I went to the local flower shop and selected a slightly off mixture of hopefully photogenic flowers.  My advertising bit - I've got a shot of the label below, as if you're about in Corfe Mullen then Just Add Flower's is a wonderful shop to go to - very friendly and flower's everywhere (which is what you want!).  Here's the bunch as I bought them:

I'm not great with flower names - the lady in the shop (I didn't catch her name) did tell me what they were all called, but I think I'm going to have to revisit this post with some details.  So below are a bunch of shots of the flowers.  These are mostly taken with a 7D and Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens, but also with 5Dmk2 and Sigma 50mm f1.4.

This one was against black card, but the flash lit it as grey.  I quite like the contrast between the flower and the background (saturation reduced quite a bit on the flower):

This is a silhouette against the window:

I started using a couple of coloured plastic sheets as backgrounds here - I think they add interest to the shot overall rather than having a plain black background:

This was backlit with the flash:

I think this one is my favourite - I love the colour contrast between the flower and the red background:

This was the macro lens at f2.8 - the DoF must be 1-2 mm:

And a classic rose:

This was one of the few taken with the 50mm f1.4 - the ultra-shallow DoF shows as the focal point is just the top of the rose:

And finally, the place they all came from:

Technically, as I said above, most of the shots were taken with the 7D and 100mm f2.8 macro.  I used the master flash functionality of the 7D and a 430EX in slave mode - hand held in various positions - to light the flowers.  Generally, the position that worked best was to have the flash head on to the "face" of the flower to minimise shadows, but I also used a combination of just the off-camera flash and both the off-camera and on-camera (pop-up) flash also to try and minimise distracting shadows.

All in all, it was a lot of fun to spend an hour or so taking these shots!