The following images show my set up for my still life studio in my conservatory. I started off with a small pet tank to photograph my flowers and ink inside, eventually this became difficult to work with as it was too small and difficult to photograph the length of the flower without getting the edges of the tank. As I was photographing in daylight it was a decision to either photograph with natural light on the flower and a flash lit background or to light the foreground with a flash too. I experimented with both lighting techniques and found that I definitely needed to light the backdrop with flash soft boxes but depending on the amount of natural light on the day would depend on whether I needed to light the foreground with a flash light too.
Eventually I moved to a bigger fish tank as the smaller pet tank was getting difficult to work with, the bigger tank gave me more space to work with and allowed more room for the ink to spread out. I also had help from my step-dad setting up the position of the flower and keeping it under the water with a piece of transparent wire hooked through several metal discs and then tied to the stem of the flower so we were able to alter the height of the flower inside the tank with a weight at the end of the wire. This process made it so much easier to disguise what was keeping the flower submerged in the water and was easy to edit out the wire post-production but the image was cropped enough to hide the metal discs.
This photo shows the set up in my conservatory of the studio equipment I used: Two soft box flash lights to light the backdrop, studio light with umbrella reflector (eventually used a white umbrella) , a white backdrop, my Nikon D5500 on a tripod to ensure stability attached to my laptop with Capture one to release the shutter without having to touch the camera itself. I completed 4 shoots with this set up as it was very handy being in my house it was easy access and I could experiment with different flowers and inks in a convenient way.
In order to empty and fill the water tank it was very difficult in comparison to the smaller pet tank which I could run back and forth to the sink to empty and refill. Therefore we just used the garden hose to fill up the tank as the studio was based in the conservatory this made the process easier. The tank was filled up with the hose from the garden and drained through a siphon process back out through the hose again. Although this was a long process, it made it easier in the long run and meant the environment I was working in was clean and dry whereas when I was using the smaller tank, water would drip when going back and forth from the sink. This meant the tank would stay in the same place and would be drained without any mess on the equipment.
