Clivia, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Clivia, a lily-like flower originally from southern Africa, grow on the shaded side of our house with very little intervention from me. These are slow growers, but spectacular, and unstoppable once established. I love them, but they’re tough to photograph in the deep shade, with their tendency to move in the slightest wind.

So the obvious move was to cut a nice stem of clivia, put it in a vase, and photograph indoors.

The clivia is shown here stopped down to f/32 for a high depth-of-field image. I put the stem in the vase on a black background using sun light for illumination. Like the anemone I photographed the other day, the final image represents several initial exposures at different shutter speeds (see the technical data below).

So, I assembled the flowers on the clivia stem from two exposures, one lighter and one darker. Looking at the results, I saw I needed more construction. I was looking at a horizontal, and the image needed to be vertical. This switch was a matter of cropping in on the flower, extending the canvas downward using a black background color, and adding a layer to extend a cloned version of the stem.

[Nikon D300, Sigma 50mm f/2.8 macro lens (75mm in 35mm terms), 1/5 of a second and 4/5 of a second at f32 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Related images: Asiatic Lily Bouquet, Sunflower.