Light painting - Christmas cactus flower

[MikeJ]

My wife has an incredible green thumb - at one point our sunroom looked like a tropical rainforest! One of the many flowering plants she has is a Christmas cactus. Supposedly these bloom once a year, although curiously not always near Christmas! So couple that with usually there are multiple blooms clumped together, getting a single bloom can be a bit of a challenge. So I was pretty excited when one started shooting out individual blooms.

I took a few images with one large softbox off to the side, to give that soft, wrap around lighting. Some of those turned out pretty cool. But I wanted more, so I decided to try something I haven't for many, many years - light painting. The image below is lit entirely with a Mini-Mag flashlight with a fiberoptic wand. It took several attempts to get just the right lighting on each petal, the stamen, the leaves...all in all, I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out.

Setup was pretty simple - totally black room (in my basement), black foam core about 4 feet behind the flower, camera set on T, and paint away!

Your thoughts?

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[MorganP]

Very nice.

 

[MikeJ]

Thank you, Morgan!

 

[Callie]

beautiful, Mike, love the dark BG with the red-pink

 

[MikeJ]

Thank you so much, Callie! It was fun and challenging at the same time, and there's actually very little post-processing.

 

[JAS]

Well done! They are such beautiful blooms to photograph!

 

[MikeJ]

Thank you, Joe! They certainly are, and I think I've had this idea in my head for a couple years. Just the blooms and my time schedule never seemed to sync...until now!