When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it. ~ Lord Byron

Photograph taken today. I’m rather thrilled with a new approach I’m taking. I’m just getting back into photography, so I don’t have much equipment. I’ve been photographing with natural light in my Veranda, but the space is tight, and the light seems to either be too dull or too strong and it’s hard to see the LCD view. So today, I brought up this pot of Fuchsia to my studio, set it near the skylight, put an on-camera flash on the camera and then holding the shutter release in one hand, I held up layered translucent curtain fabric in front of the flash for a home-made soft-box effect. I’m pretty happy with the results. I got nice detail in the flower and nice highlights. Next step will be to put the flash off-camera and set up another off-camera flash for the background.

For the background, I took one of Michel’s blue T-shirts and pinned it to the wall! It looked a little too much like a T-shirt tacked to a wall though, so I softened the wrinkles and then “burned” in some color around the edges using overlay layers in Photoshop.