First lightbox photo

Someone from camera club was giving away her lightbox so i took it off her hands. For my first attempt at lightbox photography, I picked a hydrangea from my yard, removed the petals, and arranged them on the lightbox. I then made a lot of images, trying bracketing, focus stacking, etc. But for this one, I just processed one image....or perhaps overprocessed it! It was a faded pink, so I changed the color temp. and the hue, moved around the highlight and shadow sliders in LR, and then moved it into PS, where I applied Glamour Glow from Nik CEP and tweaked it a little more. I'm not crazy about the composition (need to work on re-arranging petals / flowers better) but I'm pretty happy with the processing. But I look forward to your input!

Lucky you for getting a free lightbox! The translucence from the lightbox is its magic and arranging the petals for creating overlapping parts for color variations is part of the fun. It is actually the centers of the flowers that first catch my attention, so you might want to consider that in arranging them. Also since that top center flower is the 2nd largest in the image, my preference would be that it was mostly in focus. I would probably not include those 3 separate pieces of petals on the left side. I would arrange it similar to the right side with parts of petals behind a more major flower. I do like the wavy edges of the flowers and how they are more blue. Makes me want to go play around with one of my hydrangea blooms!

Nancy...thank you for your very helpful input and advice!

Hi, Wendy, my first lightbox image was with individual plumbago petals which looks almost the same without the centers. Nancy makes some great points regarding composition. It's all a matter of playing around until you get something you like.:S3:

Very pretty colours, maybe the thing would be to try petals without centers? I think I have seen peas in a pod (opened up) which was a very cool image. This looks like hours of fun.

Very strong image. I look forward to more lightbox studies! I built a lightbox years ago to sort slides. I have to dig it out of the basement and clean it up.

Nice image! I would experiment with making one more centered.

A lightbox is fun, but often on the small side. A quick and easy version is a piece of translucent plexi about 2-3 ft square, propped between two stools, lighted from beneath by a desk lamp or a flash.