A fun indoor photo exercise is capturing a flower of your choice in high key lighting. High-key lighting simply refers to images that are mostly bright, with a range of light tones and whites and not many blacks or mid-tones.

What you’ll need:

1. Flower with its stem
2. Clamp
3. White background
4. Tripod
5. Camera
6. External flash unit

In a room well-lit with natural light set up your flower in front of a white background. I used an A2 white sheet of paper. I also used a 105mm macro lens for this picture but any 18-55mm kit lens will work just as well. Zoom out as far as you can so the flower nearly fills the frame and then set up your tripod at this spot.

Make use of manual focus on LIVE view and choose the focal point. Shoot in Aperture priority mode with ISO 100 for the best possible quality and f-stop of 5.6 for a shallow depth of field. Overexpose by 2 stops (+2EV) with your exposure compensation. All that’s left to do is aim your external flash at a white background (like the ceiling) that will bounce the light towards the flower. Make use of TTL (through the lens) mode on the external flash and adjust the flash’s exposure compensation to achieve the desired result if the first few photos are either too dark or too bright.

Once you master the technique your portrait and product photography will greatly benefit from the high key treatment.

If you’re looking for more info on how to shoot different subjects in high key here’s a more detailed tutorial at Photography.Tutsplus.com

EJ