Fluorescent or Halogen? Help Needed.

[Garry Edwards]

Ahh.. Your saying that one of the reasons it's lacking is because it's too evenly lit then?

Yes. Lighting is about the bits you don't light, i.e. it's about creating shadows (in the right places). Even = flat = boring.

When I turned on the overhead flash I moved the boom up as high as it'd go and it cured it. I don't have the pictures here on my laptop but I'm sure the results were similar to the 2nd picture in my last post.

I'm going to try this again in the morning with the boom angled up much higher and the flash head angled back down so it's higher and farther away still.

That may work well, it may not. As I said before, making it higher and further away makes it effectively smaller and harsher. That may or may not give you an effect that suits, put if I was doing this job my guess is that I would want it as low as possible to get the overhead fill as soft as possible - the difference though is that I have lights that have far more adjustment than yours. You may find that the answer lies in another layer of ND gel, maybe 0.3.

I purchased one of those heavy duty Lencarta booms. It's fantastic!

You actually purchased the lightweight home studio boom. Now, the heavyweight one really is fantastic

 

[arad85]

I just read the manual on colour balance. It sounds like some sort of on camera, post exposure editing tool as opposed to a pre-exposure setting?

Yes. When you take the picture and save as JPG, the camera has to apply some processing to the image. White Balance and Colour Space are what the camera uses to take the RAW data and develop it to a JPEG image. It chooses how much R, G and B go to the final image. For example a cooler colour (i.e. lower temperature, but paradoxically more red/yellow) will bias the colours towards oranges.

Easy to try and see what happens. Set the camera on K and snap some pictures whilst changing the K value. Lower Ks will produce redder/oranger images, higher Ks will produce images gradually biased towards blue.

Of course, if you were shooting in RAW, it would be very easy to change this in post.. but that's a discussion best had when you're getting critical on colour accuracy Let's get the shadows and exposure right first...

 

[arad85]

Yes. Lighting is about the bits you don't light, i.e. it's about creating shadows (in the right places). Even = flat = boring.

Good info with the pictures to illustrate... More to add to my further experiments over the weekend

 

[Steve T]

Make one of these

stick a bunch of flowers on a lighting tripod four feet from that window and get someone to shine the thing all over it, up/down/side/behind shoot it on full auto and see what you get. You can lose the tripod stem in post. I think continuous lighting would be far easier than all that poncing about.

 

[Richard King]

Well, I must have taken a few hundred test shots today with a range of different light positions, f-stops, shutter speeds and ISO settings. It's true when they say that the first 90% of progress is achieved in 10% of the time. The last 10% of progress is taking the rest. I just can't seem to get the pictures the way I want them (like this):

OK, so I've not painted the walls grey yet or the ceiling black but I did install the DX2 mode 1/I and the results were a little weird. Over saturated and dark:

I played with the sRGB and Adobe colour settings but I couldn't get a nice shot in DX2 Mode 1 so I reverted back to the Neutral colour profile on the camera. The best shot of the day was this one (helped along I'd say by the natural light that was in the room:

Even with ISO 200 and the beauty dish as far away as possible, we're just not getting the right results:

I know it's impossible to get the effect of a bright sunshining day but I'd hoped for better results than we're getting. I think I need a bigger photo studio so I can push the subject out into the centre of the room and walk round it for the different angles. Unfortunately, we don't have a bigger room for photos :nono:

As always, keen to hear your responses and advice.

This is how I see it
You are placing your flowers on a surface. They look better with the hard lighting, but that is giving you ugly hard shadows

The soft lighting looks very flat

You are swinging between the two and not finding a middle ground

You either need to
1. Very carefully flag the hard lighting, and control its direction so it either doesn't contribute to the shadow on the background
2. Separate the flowers from the background

 

[silkblooms]

This is how I see it
You are placing your flowers on a surface. They look better with the hard lighting, but that is giving you ugly hard shadows

The soft lighting looks very flat

You are swinging between the two and not finding a middle ground

You either need to
1. Very carefully flag the hard lighting, and control its direction so it either doesn't contribute to the shadow on the background
2. Separate the flowers from the background

I like the shadows though. I feel that shadows add depth and texture and in this case, realism to our artificial flowers. In an ideal world, the surface that the flowers are resting on would be best if it was white and the shadows would be best if they were just a shade or two darker. I'm going to try some more experimentaion with flash but I won't be trying continuous lighting. Been there, tried that, pretty boring results. I'm getting somewhere with flash, just need to fine tune it more.

 

[silkblooms]

Yes. Lighting is about the bits you don't light, i.e. it's about creating shadows (in the right places). Even = flat = boring.

That may work well, it may not. As I said before, making it higher and further away makes it effectively smaller and harsher. That may or may not give you an effect that suits, put if I was doing this job my guess is that I would want it as low as possible to get the overhead fill as soft as possible - the difference though is that I have lights that have far more adjustment than yours. You may find that the answer lies in another layer of ND gel, maybe 0.3.
You actually purchased the lightweight home studio boom. Now, the heavyweight one really is fantastic

That's a lightweight one?! I can't imagine needing a heavier one really

The 0.3ND gel has just arrived so I'm going to try some experiments with lighting (or not lighting) the areas that are causing the boring flatness of these pics.

One quick question, you say that the overhead flash is, "in effect just an off-axis fill light". By this I take it you mean to aim it off centre, maybe towards the back of the subject?

 

[Garry Edwards]

To summarise:
1. You're 90% there but the law of diminishing returns has now kicked in so you're finding it difficult to get the final 10%.
2. Lack of space is causing a bit of a problem - not insurmountable, it's just making the job more difficult than it would be in a larger space
3. Lack of adjustment on your flash heads is making life harder for you - if you had a modern flash head that adjusted from full to 1/32nd power instead of from full to 1/4 power, you would have overcome the ratio problem before now.
4. You still seem to be having difficulty understanding how much effect that white wall is having. You need to control the effects of bounce light, and to understand that it's having a negative effect - so although you have now moved the table out a bit (I think) and have removed that white bounce card, you need to paint that bit of wall grey, or simply put a piece of grey or better still black paper or cloth on the wall to kill the reflection. If you then find that you need just a little reflected light, you add it with a reflector.

As for wanting to create the hardest possible lighting consistent with not losing too much detail in the shadows and highlights, and wanting shadows on the background, that is exactly what I would do. 3-dimensional product shots make people want to reach out and touch the product, and if they want to touch it they also want to buy it, and nothing else is good enough IMO. shadowless lighting is beginner lighting.

 

[Garry Edwards]

That's a lightweight one?! I can't imagine needing a heavier one really

The 0.3ND gel has just arrived so I'm going to try some experiments with lighting (or not lighting) the areas that are causing the boring flatness of these pics.

One quick question, you say that the overhead flash is, "in effect just an off-axis fill light". By this I take it you mean to aim it off centre, maybe towards the back of the subject?

No, that just means that it isn't where the lens is - a true fill light is where the lens is.

What I've basically tried to do here is to walk you through the steps needed to get the results you need, but remotely. If you had come to me for training I would have started off with just the key light - the honeycombed beauty dish) and then lowered the overhead softbox. Personally I would have started with a larger (and better) softbox on a better flash head, but you have to work with what you have, and It would have been as low as space allowed, to produce a really soft fill light. Eventually, I would probably have switched it on too - but at a very low power setting, and then just experimented with that power setting until I had just enough light from it to fill the areas that need fill but without destroying the strong light from the beauty dish. Your real problem is the difficulty of adjusting the power of that overhead light and I think that this has added to your problem - you have unwittingly been playing a game of push-pull with the 2 lights.

I'm running a lighting course on Sunday. 5 people of varying levels of studio experience booked so far, and I know that the one think that will shock them (and especially any who think that they understand light) is my opening statement that we never, ever, start lighting anything with more than one light. We use one light to create the effect we want, and if (as often happens) we then find that although the shadows are in the right place they are too strong for our taste, we add an extra light (or an extra source of light, e.g. a reflector) to mitigate those shadows. After that, we deal with the peripheral issues such as effect lights (hairlight, rim lights) and finally we think about lighting the background.

I should have told you about the overhead light later, but if I'd done that you would probably have given up and would never have got this far

 

[arad85]

I'm running a lighting course on Sunday. 5 people of varying levels of studio experience booked so far, and I know that the one think that will shock them (and especially any who think that they understand light) is my opening statement that we never, ever, start lighting anything with more than one light. We use one light to create the effect we want, and if (as often happens) we then find that although the shadows are in the right place they are too strong for our taste, we add an extra light (or an extra source of light, e.g. a reflector) to mitigate those shadows. After that, we deal with the peripheral issues such as effect lights (hairlight, rim lights) and finally we think about lighting the background.

DOH! I think that's where I've been going wrong here - I've been starting with the overhead light! Will try it your way around over the weekend.

 

[silkblooms]

To summarise:
1. You're 90% there but the law of diminishing returns has now kicked in so you're finding it difficult to get the final 10%.
2. Lack of space is causing a bit of a problem - not insurmountable, it's just making the job more difficult than it would be in a larger space
3. Lack of adjustment on your flash heads is making life harder for you - if you had a modern flash head that adjusted from full to 1/32nd power instead of from full to 1/4 power, you would have overcome the ratio problem before now.
4. You still seem to be having difficulty understanding how much effect that white wall is having. You need to control the effects of bounce light, and to understand that it's having a negative effect - so although you have now moved the table out a bit (I think) and have removed that white bounce card, you need to paint that bit of wall grey, or simply put a piece of grey or better still black paper or cloth on the wall to kill the reflection. If you then find that you need just a little reflected light, you add it with a reflector.

As for wanting to create the hardest possible lighting consistent with not losing too much detail in the shadows and highlights, and wanting shadows on the background, that is exactly what I would do. 3-dimensional product shots make people want to reach out and touch the product, and if they want to touch it they also want to buy it, and nothing else is good enough IMO. shadowless lighting is beginner lighting.

We're in agreement I'd say on just about everything

1. The law of diminishing returns just means I need to try harder.
2. Lack of space has forced me to get rid of the long grey table completely out of the room. I've removed all unneeded equipment and I've adopted the small trestle table in a position that's 3.5 m from the window so that there's 'some' natural light in the equation. I know you're all going to say to black out that window but I would argue with that as any natural light is a Godsend in my view (certainly for flower photography). Granted it will make consistency difficult but nothing an f-stop or two won't tweak, surely.
3. I may have given you misleading info about the adjustment range of the Elinchrom 500's. Here's a snapshot of the sliders:

As you can see, I have the overhead on it's lowest power and it has two layers of ND gel in the softbox cover. One layer of 0.9 and now a layer of 0.3. I've taken your advice and lowered the head as low as can be. The beuty dish has been repositioned.
4. I've moved the subject well away from the white walls now as the small trestle lets me do this when the larger table's been removed from the room. I now have some space to actually walk round the subject as it's a good three feet from teh white walls. If you think I'm still getting too much bounce then let me know and I'll attach some grey carpet tiles to the nearby walls.

I know this one's a tad over-exposed at the tip of the white roses but I could live with this as it makes it slightly softer. what do you think:

(f14 1/80th ISO 200 exposure compensation++5)

 

[arad85]

I know you're all going to say to black out that window but I would argue with that as any natural light is a Godsend in my view (certainly for flower photography). Granted it will make consistency difficult but nothing an f-stop or two won't tweak, surely.

If the composition of the daylight is the same as the flashes, it just increases exposure. If it is different, it will introduce a colour cast depending on how much light gets in and how different it is from the flash heads light composition.

The reason studios tend to be in rooms without windows is exactly to control the light getting to the subject. You can change colours with white balance and develop settings - either in camera or in post if you shoot raw.

3. I may have given you misleading info about the adjustment range of the Elinchrom 500's. Here's a snapshot of the sliders:

No you haven't. One of the sliders is for the modelling light, the other for the flash, so the range of exposure is 100% power to 25% power. With a 0.9 and 0.3 ND in place (i.e. 4 stops), you are taking it from 1/16th power (100% with 4 stops of attenuation) to 1/256th power (25% with 4 stops of attenuation).

I've taken your advice and lowered the head as low as can be. The beuty dish has been repositioned.

What power is the beauty dish on and how far away is it from the flowers?

what do you think:

Best yet IMHO (although you're still in Adobe RGB ). What do you think? Are the shadows cast by the key light dark enough for you?

 

[silkblooms]

I've tweaked the exposure and the colour profiles and here's a picture that surpasses my expectations:

 

[arad85]

I've tweaked the exposure and the colour profiles and here's a picture that surpasses my expectations:

And in sRGB too so it looks right on my screen as well!!

Only two things to note then...

• The time on you camera is an hour fast
• Looks like you could do with a sensor clean

 

[Garry Edwards]

We're in agreement I'd say on just about everything

1. The law of diminishing returns just means I need to try harder.
2. Lack of space has forced me to get rid of the long grey table completely out of the room. I've removed all unneeded equipment and I've adopted the small trestle table in a position that's 3.5 m from the window so that there's 'some' natural light in the equation. I know you're all going to say to black out that window but I would argue with that as any natural light is a Godsend in my view (certainly for flower photography). Granted it will make consistency difficult but nothing an f-stop or two won't tweak, surely.

Black it out. It may look better to you, but it's adding nothing to the photography except to make it more difficult.

I may have given you misleading info about the adjustment range of the Elinchrom 500's. Here's a snapshot of the sliders:

No, that confirms what I already knew. Elinchrom make good equipment but that isn't one of their star products. What you have there is 500Ws of power that can only be reduced to a quarter. Life would be much easier if you had say a 300Ws flash that could be reduced to 1/32nd power - but you can manage, with the ND gels.

As you can see, I have the overhead on it's lowest power and it has two layers of ND gel in the softbox cover. One layer of 0.9 and now a layer of 0.3.

Setting it to a quarter power has reduced it to 125ws. The 0.9 gel has further reduced it to 15.63Ws and the 0.3 gel has further reduced it to 7.81Ws. That should be OK. A 300Ws flash head at 1/32nd power would reduce to 9.38Ws so there is now nothing in it.

If you think I'm still getting too much bounce then let me know and I'll attach some grey carpet tiles to the nearby walls.

I can't be sure from 200 miles away but I think you are still getting too much bounce.

I know this one's a tad over-exposed at the tip of the white roses but I could live with this as it makes it slightly softer. what do you think:

(f14 1/80th ISO 200 exposure compensation++5)

Increase the shutter speed to say 1/125th, to reduce the effect of the light pollution from that window that you like so much, the 'exposure compensation' is irrelevant. Maybe there is still too much bounced light (I think there is) or maybe not quite enough light from the beauty dish, you may need to move it closer just to increase the ratio, even though you need to have it fairly distant to create a harder light.

Lighting is a bit like pushing your finger into a balloon - it seems to work but but the displaced air just goes somewhere else

 

[Richard King]

I like the shadows though. I feel that shadows add depth and texture and in this case, realism to our artificial flowers. In an ideal world, the surface that the flowers are resting on would be best if it was white and the shadows would be best if they were just a shade or two darker. I'm going to try some more experimentaion with flash but I won't be trying continuous lighting. Been there, tried that, pretty boring results. I'm getting somewhere with flash, just need to fine tune it more.

I was referring to the hard shadows on the background, not the (good) defining shadows on the product, maybe we crossed wires

 

[Richard King]

so the wall is bouncing light, put something black and non reflective on it (fabric) - that will help a lot

 

[Garry Edwards]

Other people seem to be able to post videos on TP, it's beyond me so here is a link to a blog entry (in 3 parts) and a video.

OK, it's a different type of subject using different lighting tools, but I think it explains HOW and WHY I approach the lighting as I do, 1 step and 1 light at a time, so it may help.
You'll also get an idea of the distances involved, and the absence of unwanted reflections and/or unwanted natural light.

 

[silkblooms]

Other people seem to be able to post videos on TP, it's beyond me so here is a link to a blog entry (in 3 parts) and a video.

OK, it's a different type of subject using different lighting tools, but I think it explains HOW and WHY I approach the lighting as I do, 1 step and 1 light at a time, so it may help.
You'll also get an idea of the distances involved, and the absence of unwanted reflections and/or unwanted natural light.

Nice video, you have some really nice kit there Garry. I could really use a setup like that. I've been trying to struggle by with the equipment that I do have and I'm definitely making gains. You'll probably disapprove but I've introduced a 3rd light to take the greyness off of the backboard.

The daylight has gone and so the window's blacked out Here's what I've done now. I've moved the little trestle table back in towards the walls but this time the walls are lined with the black inners from a couple of product tents. The reflection off the wall is now negligible.

I've repositioned the beauty dish to a closer proximity and I've lowered the overhead unit to about ten inches above the subject.

The speedlight is sitting on top of the softbox, angled down towards the backboard at 45deg. The way it's positioned above the softbox means that almost all of the speedlight flash is directed at the white backboard (which I've angled back towards the ceiling at about 10deg.)

I'm on my laptop again so I don't have the test shots I did with metadata. I only have two product shots I've saved for web and devices:

We'd be more than happy to use this as a product shot on our website. he colours are absolutely spot on and there's a nicelyy lit background with a delicate shadow and a nice depth. I have no doubt that it could improved on but I feel the law of diminishing returns is now on the last 5%.

As with the next image, there was a little post shot editing in CS5. I've added a little lens flare as you can see to both images, just to give the pictures a little, 'something'. I did have to add a little saturation but not much. This next product needed more saturation as with most hot-pink or red items it seemed to need a little extra:

Not sure what you all think but I'm pretty happy with these. They're nowhere near as good as the orange calla lily bouquet I linked to above (taken in the summer sun)..... but I don't think indoor photography could ever compete with the summer sun, could it?

 

[Garry Edwards]

Nice video, you have some really nice kit there Garry.

I do. Of course, there will be some people who will think that it's because of my connection with Lencarta but the reality is that I've always spent about 4-5 times as much on lighting as on cameras and lenses - after all, photography is all about light and studio photography is almost exclusively all about light. I find it strange that so many people spend thousands on expensive cameras and lenses and seem to begrudge spending anything on the one thing that can really make a big difference to the quality of their work...

We'd be more than happy to use this as a product shot on our website. he colours are absolutely spot on and there's a nicelyy lit background with a delicate shadow and a nice depth. I have no doubt that it could improved on but I feel the law of diminishing returns is now on the last 5%.

You're probably right.

Not sure what you all think but I'm pretty happy with these. They're nowhere near as good as the orange calla lily bouquet I linked to above (taken in the summer sun)..... but I don't think indoor photography could ever compete with the summer sun, could it?

Of course it can. The only quality of summer sun is that it makes us feel good. There is nothing that the sun can do in lighting terms that we can't easily produce in the studio, and in the studio we have complete control of hard/soft, direction and reflections.

 

[silkblooms]

Of course it can. The only quality of summer sun is that it makes us feel good. There is nothing that the sun can do in lighting terms that we can't easily produce in the studio, and in the studio we have complete control of hard/soft, direction and reflections.

So you think you'd be able to reproduce this, in a studio?:

 

[Garry Edwards]

I could do a lot better than that. And in case that sounds like a boast, so could any specialist still life photographer. And given the progress that you've made in just a couple of weeks, I'm sure you can see that you too could do better soon. The lighting works well on the ribbon, not at all well on the petals, and it isn't sharp.

 

[silkblooms]

It doesn't sound like a boast, it's just the opposite of what I've heard everywhere else on the net. Everyone else says that you simply can't replicate the sun because of the energy that it emitts in every spectrum.

I'm not sure what you think of the two images I posted last night (the pink gerbera pomander ball and the purple/ivory posy with the criss-cross ribbons) but if you say I'll be able to replicate the light from the sun then I'm all ears as to how. Even in this small (3.5m x 4.4m) room?

If it means I'd need to spend a few quid on equipment (lights upgrade, additional small honeycomb, light meter, grey paint, black paint, a better lens, blackout blinds, shooting table, larger softbox, whatever else) then I'm all ears. What single piece of equiment or course of action would you say I'd benefit from most, now?

 

[arad85]

What single piece of equiment or course of action would you say I'd benefit from most, now?

I've no idea on the equipment (way out of my depth now!) but I'd say something that will only cost your time would be to understand white balance and how it affects your pictures. A bit of googling for some background and then setting the camera white balance into K and taking some pics of a controlled subject whilst varying the temperature (5000K-6000K in 100k steps is a good start) setting should give you a basic understanding.

You might also want to shoot some raw images and open them in Photoshop (I think you have this) and just playing with the White Balance and Temperature/Tint sliders just to see how it affects the image and how you can change it in post processing. You need to shoot raw for this experiment as when you shoot JPEG, the camera uses the colour temperature to develop the RAW image into the JPEG in camera so has already applied the transform to the data.

With calibration, you can get your camera, or - better still - your post processing software, to "develop" the images in a way that closely mimics the pictures taken under the sun. It's a question of getting all the settings correct with the lights you have to do it.

 

[silkblooms]

I've no idea on the equipment (way out of my depth now!) but I'd say something that will only cost your time would be to understand white balance and how it affects your pictures. A bit of googling for some background and then setting the camera white balance into K and taking some pics of a controlled subject whilst varying the temperature (5000K-6000K in 100k steps is a good start) setting should give you a basic understanding.

You might also want to shoot some raw images and open them in Photoshop (I think you have this) and just playing with the White Balance and Temperature/Tint sliders just to see how it affects the image and how you can change it in post processing. You need to shoot raw for this experiment as when you shoot JPEG, the camera uses the colour temperature to develop the RAW image into the JPEG in camera so has already applied the transform to the data.

With calibration, you can get your camera, or - better still - your post processing software, to "develop" the images in a way that closely mimics the pictures taken under the sun. It's a question of getting all the settings correct with the lights you have to do it.

I did used to shoot in RAW but it's too time consuming when it comes to batching images and they're all in RAW format.

The colours we're getting are spot on all of the monitors. The WB is set on PRE. We simply place a pure white object under the flash and set the custom white balance this way. The results are pretty good. I think perhaps the foamex backboards we're using are not pure white, #ffffff but a very slight shade of off white.

The way we usually process our images is to snap a couple of dozen images of each product at varying angles. Then, manually select the best ones and Photoshop them (crop, rotate, brighten, whatever). It's time consuming and we have a full time employee who takes care of it. However, shooting in RAW would mean another full time employee

 

[arad85]

I did used to shoot in RAW but it's too time consuming when it comes to batching images and they're all in RAW format.

It isn't. If it does, you're doing it wrong or you have old computers that take an age to process raws (which could be a problem I admit - I have a very powerful desktop here)...

What you are missing is the ability to control the way the colours are rendered by the development process. It wasn't until recently I realised how differently the different in-camera develop settings affected the image. I think they're called Picture Controls on the D300 and produce marked differences depending on which are selected.

The colours we're getting are spot on all of the monitors.

[PEDANTIC]Don't you mean close enough?[/PEDANTIC] It's not just about white balance, but also how the camera applies the mapping of values that come off the chip into the colours you see on screen. Did you look at the thread I linked to: http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=366035 Both photos look "right" taken in isolation, but I think the animation in the second post really hits home how much the camera profiles can get it wrong and the eye compensates for it. Look at the blues in the animation - a much better rendition whilst the white balance (the grey squares on the card) doesn't change much at all.

The WB is set on PRE. We simply place a pure white object under the flash and set the custom white balance this way.

OK but you're white balancing to something that is close to white, but not necessarily white (I'm being pedantic again here ). Also, just to check, when you take a photo for white balance purposes, none of the R/G/B channels are saturated. If they are, you don't get a true view of the balance. This is why people suggest shooting something like an 18% grey target rather than pure white.

The results are pretty good.

To be honest, that's probably all that matters

The way we usually process our images is to snap a couple of dozen images of each product at varying angles. Then, manually select the best ones and Photoshop them (crop, rotate, brighten, whatever). It's time consuming and we have a full time employee who takes care of it. However, shooting in RAW would mean another full time employee

That's where I think you're wrong. What I'm aiming for here is to calibrate my workflow once, shoot RAW and then apply the calibration when I import the photos. This then leaves me with properly corrected images ready for any human post processing (i.e. crop/rotate/brighten etc). When I have selected my images, I just export those developed images for our web site. Raw files give me the ability to get the photos right for my shooting conditions, but do have the downside that they are much larger (and consequently need more processing power to chew through).

Ideally though, I'm aiming to control my environment/processing to such an extent that hardly any post processing is required, just a selection of the correct images and final tweaks as necessary. The last photos I did took a couple of hours to photograph and about 15 minutes selecting and post processing - most I didn't even need to do anything to - just export.

 

[Garry Edwards]

It doesn't sound like a boast, it's just the opposite of what I've heard everywhere else on the net. Everyone else says that you simply can't replicate the sun because of the energy that it emitts in every spectrum.

With respect, until you came on to this forum everyone told you to photograph your flowers in a light tent using continuous lighting. And, according to the net, Elvis Presley is living on his own private island in the Maldives... There's a lot of good info on the net, but it isn't all good

This is definitely one of the better forums but there are other good ones (or at least there used to be) and I think that this post should help. In it, highly skilled and highly experienced photographer Brooks Short has set out exactly how he has lit a bunch of flowers (as it happens) and you'll see that he has started with the key light and then added other lights as necessary, as I explained to you only yesterday.

And here's another one. This one is on food but the same techniques are in play.

Extra equipment? Maybe, but probably not. Knowledge is far more important, although you might end up buying another flash head or 2 in the future - depends on how ambitious you become. You may though end up buying a few lighting gels, to create local (warm) colour, although of course changing the colour may result in 'wrong' colour.