Macro with flash falloff

11/12/2016

Lately, I've been distracting myself from political affairs with a little bit of macro photography. These pictures are taken from my current round of Camelina growing in the WUSTL greenhouse. I really love macro photography, but sometimes the blurry, out of focus background can distract the observer from the true subject. In order to highlight only the subject, I've been experimenting with flash falloff, a method that achieves nearly black backgrounds even in daylight conditions. This is done by engaging the flash with a very fast shutter speed. This results in a high proportion of light returning from the nearby focal subject, but very little from the more distant background. An advantage of this method is that the fast shutter speed will produce more crisp images, even without a tripod.