A Simple Backlighting Setup

For a recent Project 365 entry I used this backlit image of some white chrysanthemums. Translucent subjects, such as flowers, make good subjects for this sort of lighting and it gives something a bit different from the norm. Fortunately, the flowers were arranged in a shallow glass bowl, which made the whole thing a bit easier.

To light this image, I used a piece of glass that was raised up from the working surface. Underneath the glass, pointing upwards, was my flash. This was set to it’s widest beam setting to try and get an even spread of light. On top of the glass was a diffuser panel to further help the spread of the light and on top of this was the bowl of flowers. The image below shows the setup in my kitchen studio.

For the final image I also held a reflector above the flowers to get some light back onto the top of them. You could use a second light above the flowers to add some more fill, it depends on the balance of light that you want.

I’ve used this setup for a couple of the other Project 365 images, such as the pasta shot from 24th April and the blue abstract from 20th March.