A studio is a frame of mind, not a place. When I tell people that I am in my studio, it means to me that I am working as an artist—and not where I am doing that work. By now, it is pretty generally understood that cameras don’t make photos and people do. A physical room doesn’t make a photo, either. Having a creative eye is always more important than having the coolest gear, and the best photographers improvise using the space they have, rather than the studio they wished they had.

The tulips looked great in their glass vase, extended and drooping. But when I positioned the tulips in front of my light box there was a clear problem as you can see in the frame below: the composition extended above, below and to the right of the single frame.

To build this image, I shot a left panel and a right panel, using my high-key technique for creating transparent floral images. Each panel was shot at 62mm at f/13 and ISO 100, with five exposures ranging from 1/30 of a second to 4/5 of a second. In Photoshop, I painted with a white brush on the lightest exposure of each bracketed set to remove the unwanted background areas. I then used layers and layer masks to finish each panel, and composited the finished panels together.

With the combined image on a white background, I added some filter effects for a painterly quality, then placed the image on a scanned background with a light texture overlay.