Flower Photography

Capturing the beauty of a flower with a camera, digital or film, may be a challenge for the flower photographer. Just one of the things that needs to be taken into consideration before you produce a great flower photo is focus.

Photo tip number one is focus but what are you going to focus on? Are you going to focus on the petals, the stamen, or the entire flower. This question must be answered before you begin to set up to take the photo.

After determining the subject of focus, it is time to determine how to achieve good focus of the subject. If you are using an autofocus camera, set the camera to "spot focus"
By using the spot focus setting you will achieve a much sharper close up photo. Some cameras come with a setting for close-up photography and this setting will do the same thing as switching to spot focus. What the camera is doing is optimizing the aperture and shutter speed for the best depth of field and exposure for a close-up.

If you were to handle the aperture and shutter speed manually, you would basically look for a large aperture, such as f2.8 (a small number means a large aperture) to give a selective or narrow depth of field. What you are doing is setting the flower up to stand out and away from the background, you do not want the flower to blend into the background.

To get a sharp image you must have your camera very, very still any movement will degrade the sharpness of the image. The best solution to the movement problem is a tripod. A tripod will eliminate or significantly reduce the movement of a hand held camera. This solves the camera movement, what about flower or subject movement?

Movement of the subject is much more difficult to control than the camera movement. The best solution for subject movement is often patience, wait for the wind to stop blowing. An alternative to patience might be a windbreak, some sort of object to block the air movement around your subject, such as a piece of cardboard. The windbreak could even be used to give a nice background to the flower picture, choose a contrasting but not distracting color and see how the image comes out.

Light most often will be natural daylight for the typical flower photo. Unless, you are taking the flower into a studio to shoot the photo you should only need to deal with natural light.

Natural outdoor light can still be very tricky. The very best type or the very easiest type of light would be found on an overcast day. On an overcast day you don't have to deal with hard shadows, there are no sun reflections and the light is uniform. Using any auto-focus point and shoot should give you a good image under these conditions.

If you are not so lucky and you must deal with a sunny day then a few tricks could come in handy. If the flower is located in direct sunlight and you can not wait for the sun to weaken, later in the day, or a shadow to fall over the flower then you could make a cover to place over the flower. A cover to cut down on the direct light of the sun, having some one hold up a scarf or hat to shade the flower is a great idea.

If there is just no way to shade the sunlight then stop down the aperture from the average reading to cut out more light. Watch for reflections, and sun flare from the lens. Be sure you are not taking the photo into the sun, shoot with the sun to the side and see if this makes the shooting easier.

The angle used to achieve your flower photo is up to your personal taste. There are several angles to choose from. You can shoot from under the flower looking up, over the flower looking down or you may choose to shoot from a side angle.


Each of the different angles will give you a totally different image but all 3 can make a beautiful picture.

You may also like to have an angle that includes many flowers in one shot. You can often kneel down to the level of the flower bed and take a shot across the top of many flowers, this is often a different approach."

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This is a technique, easy to do, and a little different.

Place your flower, such as a dasiy, in a vase and place the vase behind a piece of textured glass. You can place a back drop behind the vase, a piece of posterboard or hang a cloth of a complimentary color to make a clean backdrop.

Focus your camera manually on the flower, if you autofocus your camera will focus on the texture of the glass. Use a tripod and fill the frame with more flower than background.

Try this technique to make an impressionist flower portrait.