Flower Photography
The techniques listed here are useful for any relatively static, small, outdoor subject.
Plenty of places have basic composition covered. Here are a few additional tips:
- The plane of focus should be placed on the areas with the finest detail, such as the stamens or filaments.
- Focus stacking can allow more interesting compositions whilst still retaining a lot of detail. CombineZP is free.
- Putting the camera on the same vertical level as the subject will generally look better, get more in focus and blur the background more.
- Many flowers occur naturally in a variety of orientations, so don't be afraid position the camera in something other than landscape or portrait if it leads to a better composition
Some attention should be given to the background. A wide aperture will throw the background out of focus but cost depth of field. A large flower might look best with ~f5.6 and ~f8-11 will be optimal for smaller ones. If unsure, bracket the aperture and compare the results later. When using off camera flash, the ambient can be dialed down to reduce the relative brightness of the background.
Lighting
Lighting is an important factor for a successful photograph.
Natural Lighting
Direct sunlight has too much dynamic range, resulting in blown highlights, clipped shadows and a crappy image. Fortunately there are a number of methods availible to reduce the dynamic range:
- Shade the subject, resulting in an even and very soft light. This method may still have problems with the background and it is difficult to control the direction of the light.
- Reflectors may be used to fill in the shadows, reducing contrast. The reflectors are fairly cheap, but generally require an assistant and are not particularly compact.
- Polarising filters are often the best option when there is sky present or the shot is a landscape more than a macro. They are practically essential when dealing with wet vegetation.
Controlled Lighting
Fill flash is probably the most basic technique. It is used to reduce the contrast in an image. It is typically used with ambient light or a seperate key light (see below). Onboard flash is usually fine for this. Set your flash exposure compensation to -1 to -2 EV and shoot away. You are probably going to want to use it if shooting in direct sunlight.
A flash at low power on the ground was used to make the gills visible
A flash can also be used to provide the key, or main light for the image. Typically the flash would need to be placed off-camera with radio triggers (or an E-TTL cord for small subjects). Softening the light source with a shoot through umbrella will help to avoid blown highlights.
When flash is used as the main source of light, the ambient proportion of the exposure can be controlled seperately. Typically, with a single key light, a longer shutter speed will darken the background and shadows (and vice versa). If the desired background brightness results in too much contrast, a second fill light is required.
The background was exposed less than the subject
It is possible to place a coloured gel over the flash, then adjust the white balance, causing the subject to be rendered neutrally, whilst the background is thrown.
A CTO (Colour Temperature Orange) gel was used to get a blue background from light green foliage