Christmas flower arrangement

During the Christmas festivities, a family member received a flower arrangement fitting the current seasonal holiday theme.

Of course, couldn’t pass up the chance to make some photos of the flowers, so took out my camera and tripod.

Although the lighting comprised of ceiling mounted halogen spot lights was not ideal, am nonetheless pleased with the results.

Used a sheet of white paper to define a custom white balance setting first, which no doubt helped to produce better photos than with auto white balance.

Got to spend a nice Christmas Eve and relaxing Christmas day this year, with great food and good company, for which I am grateful as not everyone is that fortunate.

Gather some of you may not celebrate Christmas the way it is done here, or even celebrate it at all.

A few years ago Christmas was just another regular working day for me, but the customer am currently working for closes their offices for such holidays, quite convenient.

Created in the Christmas holiday spirit, the flower set was an explosion of bright red flowers, offset against the dark green of the leaves.

Used my Canon 450D with the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 macro USM lens mounted on, a lens that can produce really sharp images and as such ideal for this type of photography.
Even though many photos still have bokeh, used f-stop settings ranging from f/5.0 all the way to f/11 to generate enough depth of field.

Looking this close at the flowers through the viewfinder, started to think several flowers and plants in the set were artificially colored, painted red.

A trick by the florist perhaps? If indeed so, rather a shame as do prefer the natural colors, but this set still made a nice photo subject.

The flower set had a wooden base which while not cut from a genuine log or tree trunk, still warranted to snap a photo of it with the macro lens to capture some of the small details, like the wiring used to hold it together.

You can see more photography here or on my Flickr photostream.

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