Return to home page Main Menu Navigation

Cyclamen #1

Pink cyclamen flower

The story behind this image

There are many flowers with interesting and photogenic shapes, but one of my favourites is the humble cyclamen.

The curved, layered petals are ideal for a bit of macro photography with a wide open aperture for limited depth of field, allowing the rich colours to blur into the background and emphassing the shape and flow of the petal edges.

I used a plain black card as a background to set the delicate mauve of the flower against, and used heavily diffused window light on the flower itself, to prevent the colours and highlights blowing out as they would have done under more harsh lighting.

Image data

Filename - cyclamen 01.jpg

Camera - Canon A1

Lens - 50mm prime plus extension tubes

Film - Fuji Velvia ISO50

Exposure - No idea!

Location - My kitchen, North Wales

This image - 511x800px JPEG

Original - 2400dpi scan from 35mm transparency

Conversion - Adobe Lightroom

Comments - Tripod used to prevent camera movement during long exposure