Still Life: The White Rose

Although a simple image with only two components, the rose and the raindrop, there was some thought went into the production of this image. The light was provided by a single studio flash with a 90cm deep parabolic soft box positioned at 30 deg to the left and above.

This cast some shadows within the rose to add depth to the image.

The rain drop was of course an added extra. I have found that a plastic pipette is the best tool for this job as if the droplet is too big or wrongly positioned, it is possible to remove it with a squeeze of an empty pipette and have another try.

Given the lighting set up and the amount of white light that was bouncing around, the raindrop did not have a defined edge. To give the fine black line that separates it from the background, a black foam board was placed to the left side of the rose. It is the reflection of this board that creates the hard edge to the raindrop.

Post production on this was quick and easy. As the image was shot in RAW, white balance and exposure tweaks were carried out in Lightroom.

Photoshop was used to lift the shadows a little, especially in the very centre of the flower. The way that this was done, however, was a little unconventional. A little technique borrowed from my portraiture workflow. On a new layer, the "patch tool" was used to lasso a shadow area and drag it into an adjacent lighter area of similar colour. Once all of the shadow areas were treated in this way, the final effect was adjusted using the opacity slider.