My winner at the 2013 Chicago Flower and Garden show

This years Chicago flower and garden show had another photo contest. I decided to enter all categories. The categories they had were people and plants, landscapes, macro, abstract, and still life. The photos displayed in the show all deserved to be winners. The photos included flowers, tress, people, vegetables and other subjects related to plant life.

For my best entry this year I decided to go with very dramatic lighting. One way to achieve that is using minimal lighting to produce shadows everywhere. Spot lighting is a very common way of producing really dramatic shots.

I used one Mettle strobe light attached to a boom pole positioned it around 45 degrees from the front of the subject. To concentrate the light, I attached a snoot to the strobe. I then triggered the strobe with a wireless trigger connected to my Canon 6D. I then used my Canon 50mm 1.4 lens as it is excellent for doing portraits. Also the 50mm gives you the look of an actual scene you'd see with a human eye, which means the perspective is as normal as you'd see it in real life. A very important thing to consider to make the viewer the the portrait as life like. 

I then triggered the camera using my iphone...which is one of the 6d's awesome features. The smartphone triggering is especially useful when doing self portraits as it gives you real time previews of the shots, so you can adjust your position accordingly.

My winner this year.

The photo turned out great. I processed it using Lightroom. My photo ended up snagging the best photo for people and plants category.