How to Create a Fake Background for Your Flower Photography
TweetGarden and flower photography is one of many areas that nature photographers enjoy shooting. Some gardeners create beautiful settings that are perfect for flower photography and often attracting a variety of insects and birds.
Others, like myself, plant a few flowers more for decorating the house than specifically designing a garden for flower photography. At our mountain cabin we have planted a wide variety of gorgeous Columbine flowers around the outside of the cabin. They grow to be huge and are always so beautiful, I cant help but want to photograph them.
But when I pull out my 100mm macro and frame the flowers tightly, I have an old log cabin as my background. Even with the aperture wide open, the out-of-focus logs are not very natural looking. So I revert back to my commercial photography studio days when we built sets in the studio to replicate or give the illusion of a specific structure or background texture.
Since flowers looks best with an out of focus background that blends nicely with subtle tonal value, I decided to replicate that as best I could.
At the art store I bought a 2×3 foam core board and three cans of spray paint: dark green, medium green, and light green. I next sprayed ‘splotches’ of each paint onto the foam core to create a camouflage look onto the board. It is not difficult but you also want to watch that the tones blend well.
Here is the the background board leaning against the cabin and it is about 3′ from the front flowers.
Cabin logs as background
Here is the cabin logs. Hardly natural looking.
I next framed the flowers and then shot several test shots. At f/32 I could get some good depth of field making both flowers fairly sharp, but the background was just a little to sharp for my taste.
Background 3' behind at f/11
The background is out of focus perfectly for my tastes here at f/11.
Further from flowers at f/11
In this image the camera is further back at f/11 and the background is blurred nicely.
f/2.8
Moving back more and shooting at f/2.8 provides even better blur.
f/32
At f/32 to the background is much sharper in focus but still not bad.
You can certainly create any color background and texture for a wide variety of subjects and use your depth of field to create the realism. Have fun!
Canon 100mmm Macro Lens at B&H
If you have any thoughts, suggestions, or ideas, please leave a comment.
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Book on Flower Photography:
Flower Photography
Tony Sweet Flower Photography
A crumpled up jacket works pretty well in a pinch.
Another technique I read about recently. Find a nice background, take a picture of it. Print the photo large, and mount it on foam core. The use it as you suggest. Much more expensive, but I has the potential for better results.
Heh, Charlie – nice idea! I used this technique last year in Longwood gardens to photograph blue poppies when I discovered they were in a barrel with an awfully busy background! It’s a wonderful idea and thanks for sharing it with others here. Good idea to show the differences with different apertures, too. It really makes a difference where you place it and what aperture you use. Yet it’s a great way to get a good background when you otherwise can’t in the ‘real world.’
Thanks for this post.
Hi Brenda-
Thanks for your thoughts!