Photographing Flowers in DIY lightbox

My wife received flowers for her birthday, which presented a great opportunity for me to pull out the home made lightbox and take some pictures. This light box is made of styrofoam (which is very reflective) and hollow on the front and back. I use this design because I can use the light fall off to create a black background, even when the room is lit. I really do need a larger box so I can have more room on the sides to work. If you ever have a few large pieces of styrofoam, don't throw them out! In this case I probably would have been better off only using 3 pieces and the tabletop instead of placing the vase on styrofoam as well.

Thie first picture we can call our control shot, which is the flowers and their vase photographed on the table using the flash mounted on to a bookshelf camera left and behind subject bouncing off the ceiling. It is a perfectly pleasant picture, but I did not have the flash at a high enough power to use a small aperture to get the really crisp focus.



These next two photos were taken using the box with the light coming from the back. The second photo is the set up shot. Th elight from the back shows the translucency of the flowers as well as lights up the glass vase. These were taken at iso 100, f11 50mm.


The last two photos show the light bounced in from the front and a set up shot. This also created a nice effect. Note in both sets of photos I was able to turn the background black simply through control of the ratio of ambient to flash light. A little photoshop levels adjsutment and I could make this even blacker. This technique seems to work very effectively for macro photography. These were taken at iso 100, 50mm f14.