Colorful flowers are a popular subject in photography. In addition, flower photography is a particularly practical variant of landscape photography. You don’t have to travel far to photograph pretty flowers. You can often find suitable flowers in your own garden, on the balcony or in public parks. With just a few little tricks you can achieve wonderful results.
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Photographing flowers creatively: 23 practical tips
With the following 23 tips you can create beautiful flower photographs even as a beginner. Whether you use photographic equipment or your smartphone camera is entirely up to you.
Choose healthy flowers
For optimal results in flower photography, choose plants with intact flowers that are not beginning to wither. Because even if minor damage and holes on the colorful flowers hardly disturb when looking at the flower, they are particularly noticeable in a photo.
Image composition
Decide whether you want to showcase details of the flower or the flower as a whole. Apart from the choice of the image section, perspective is also an important design element in flower photography. Ideally, a beautiful blossom is not photographed from above, but close to the ground and at eye level. A side photo angle is particularly good for creating tension. In order to highlight the main subject in its environment, the rules of the golden ratio are best suited. The motif is not centered but is photographed slightly offset to the side.
Focus
To take a sharp picture of flowers, step close to the plant and focus directly on the flower. Use effects such as the depth of field or the vignetting of your lens to stage the blossom. An open aperture blurs the foreground and background elegantly and draws the eye directly to the flower. The portrait mode of your smartphone camera simulates the open aperture of a photo camera. You can focus by tapping the screen while taking a picture.
Lighting
The choice of the time of day is also particularly important in flower photography. White flowers in particular tend to outshine in direct sunlight, which means that their fine structures and details are lost. At lunchtime, shade and light are particularly rich in contrast and can have a satiating effect. Therefore, the soft light in the morning and evening hours is more suitable for flower photography. Side lighting creates additional visual variety when photographing the flowers.
Props
If you don’t just want to take pictures of pure nature, you can also prettify the plants with interesting accessories. Flower scissors, watering cans, wooden boxes, old botany books or binding cords take up the floral theme and are an exciting contrast to the filigree flowers.
Create artificial effects
With a plant atomizer, for example, raindrops can be simulated, which achieve a breathtaking effect in sunshine and backlight. Make sure that you do not have a headwind with such photographs. Otherwise, the fine water droplets land on the camera’s lens and distort the photo result.
Avoid the Central Hours of the Day
For the same reason that it is good to take photos at sunrise and sunset, the central hours of the day are the worst to take these types of photos.
The existing light causes very harsh shadows, and this excessive contrast between lights and shadows does not usually favor the photos you can take of the flowers.
Cloudy Days Are Perfect
We said that the light we have during sunrise and sunset is one of the best to get beautiful captures of flowers, while the light we have at noon is the least favorable. But there is always an exception, and in this case I mean cloudy days.
The days when the sky is covered with clouds, strange as it may appear, are ideal for taking pictures of flowers. The reason? The absence of sharp shadows. The clouds act as a giant diffuser that softens the sunlight, therefore thanks to them we will achieve that the flowers that are the protagonists of our shots have a much softer and more uniform light that will help us to achieve a correct exposure. So now you know, that the clouds do not stop you from going out to photograph flowers, but rather they push you to do it.
Take advantage of the backlights
Continuing with the theme of lighting, you will also have to take into account the direction from which it will strike. One of the most attractive is usually the light that comes from the background of the subject or object to be photographed, which we know as backlighting.
If we also wait for the sunlight to be in a lower position (during the first and last hours of the day), we will get that light to illuminate the flower petals that are translucent, creating a unique atmosphere. And if we play with closed openings, we may be able to bring out the sun with a star effect.
Beware of the Wind
When we photograph flowers, whose size is quite small and they are also fragile, the wind becomes one of our worst enemies. First, because if we opt for very close shots, the flower will be constantly out of the frame, and second, because getting a good focus on it will become an impossible mission.
To avoid this situation you have several solutions take your picture first thing in the morning, which is when there is least probability of wind.
Use a reflector or a piece of cardboard to cut and soften the air that gives the flower.
Grab the flower and photograph it indoors. It is not the most natural option, but playing with neutral and solid backgrounds you can get nice shots too.
Get closer
Flowers are a motif with so much detail that sometimes approaching them as closely as possible can give us fascinating images, in which color and texture stand out. In order to take close photos of flowers we will have several options.
The first one is that you use a telephoto lens. Normally, after the kit lens, the next lens we make is usually a TV, and this will help us get closer to our photographic motifs. Of course, in this case the focus distance will be greater than if we use other types of lenses, so in order to focus we must take into account the minimum focus distance of the lens, which is usually indicated on it. This will lead us to situations in which we will not be able to take photos as close as we would like, and therefore there are other options.
The most obvious is to work with a macro lens, since this will allow us to focus on the flower while being almost on top of it, and with exceptional quality. However, although there are many options we have when it comes to acquiring a macro lens, it is true that it is a considerable investment that not everyone can benefit from.
That is why there are a number of alternatives to macro lenses, much cheaper, that will offer us good results. These include extension tubes, close-up lenses, and the reverse ring.
Try also shooting from far away
I know that it is just the opposite of what I have told you before, but who says that a photo of a group of flowers cannot be as attractive as another in which only one appears? And not only that, but sometimes opening the frame a bit will help us to place and give context to the shot, such as a capture whose foreground is full of flowers and a mountain or stream appears as a backdrop.
Do you know the expression That the tree does not prevent you from seeing the forest? Well, for this case it comes from luxury. There will be scenes that you face in which even if you take out the flowers, you should not ignore the backdrop they have for their beauty, and because they will help you tell a story.
Use a Tripod and a Remote Trigger
A fairly common problem when taking these types of photos is that your pulse can betray you when you least expect it.
The use of a good tripod will also help you on this occasion to maintain longer exposures and low ISOs without the photo being shaky, as long as the environmental conditions are favorable and there is no wind that moves the flowers, otherwise the photo will come out. equally moved.
For macro photography there are some especially useful tripods because they allow you to extract and move the central bar. If you are going to specialize in macro flower photography and you don’t have a tripod yet, you may be interested in having this functionality.
On the other hand, you already know that every time we recommend using the tripod we also mention its direct companion, the remote trigger. Together they make the perfect combo to avoid shaky photos, so consider working with one of them. In the event that you don’t have one, then you have the option of working with your camera’s timer.
Adjust Depth of Field
The diaphragm aperture is one of the parameters that will most influence the aesthetics of our flower photography, since it will affect the depth of field of the shot and therefore the area of the image that we will appreciate as sharp.
Of course, it is not necessary that the entire flower comes out sharp in your photos. If you are working with one of the macro options, it will suffice that a key part of it comes out well in focus. It can be the stigma, the anthers, or a detail of the petals … you should be the one to choose where the focus of interest of the shot will be.
Use Live View (If you work with a tripod)
If you work with a tripod as we told you before, a function that will be of great help to achieve the perfect focus is the live view mode. Think that if we work with macro lenses the depth of field will be shallow, and therefore the focus will be very critical.
This mode allows us to activate the display of the image on the screen, in such a way that we can use the digital zoom on the exact point where we want the focus to be located, and thus, activating manual focus, we can achieve that it is very precise.
In addition, the live view mode will also be very useful when composing our photograph and checking how the final result will be. Of course, remember that if you use this mode it is advisable to carry an extra battery, since when the screen is active for longer it will drain much faster.
Pay Attention to the Background
You already know that in any photographic theme, funds take on more importance than we can think, and in this case it is no different. It is one of those types of flower photography in which a good or a bad background can elevate or destroy a good work.
So, choose to look for simple funds whenever you can, and change your position if you do not like what is visible behind the flower. In addition, you can play with the aperture of the diaphragm and the focal length to achieve a depth of field that allows you to eliminate any distraction from the background and thus isolate the subject and emphasize the attention on the flower.
As an extra trick, if none of the above options convince you, you can always take colored cards with you and put them behind the flower so that that background does not distract attention.
Change the Point of View
We always tend to bring the camera close to the eye and shoot from the most comfortable position, but that leads us to get shots that are always taken from the same angle. In this case, the simplest thing is to photograph the flower from a zenith plane, that is, from above.
If you want to get more eye-catching flower photos, it’s okay to shoot from above, but don’t limit yourself to just that point of view. Get out of your comfort zone and work on the scene in front of you. Get down, change position, look at things from another perspective … you have many options. Among them you can for example photograph the flower from the same height, or even shoot a low angle of the flower with the sky in the background.
Just by changing your perspective you can achieve original and different captures from what we are used to seeing.
Play with Unfocused Close-ups
I told you on a previous occasion that we can create creative filters with everyday objects, simply by placing them close to our lens and taking them out of focus. Well, in this case … what better creative filter than a flower?
Position yourself in such a way that you have identified the flower you want to take in your shot, but in front of it make sure there is another flower, which we will let appear blurred in one of the edges of our frame. Now is the time to focus on the flower in the background, and taking advantage of the fact that the focus will be quite critical and the minimum focus distance will not reach the flower that is closest to us, it will appear out of focus, creating an abstract and attractive feeling.
Stacking or Focus Bracketing
When we photograph a flower with a macro lens, the depth of field is usually very shallow, so much so that sometimes we cannot get the area we want clear. Given this, we can choose not to use the largest aperture of our lens, but opt for intermediate apertures such as f / 5.6 or f / 8.
But even so we will not achieve the depth of field we want. That is why an interesting option we have is to use the focus bracketing technique, which consists of taking several identical shots of a flower, changing the focus area slightly in each one. Of course the tripod will be essential, and we should not touch any parameters or the lens during the process. Just the focus ring.
The next step will be to stack all those photographs in editing, using programs such as Photoshop, Lightroom or Helicon Focus, which will be in charge of aligning the images and combining the different areas of focus in a single shot, whose depth of field will surprise us.
Add a Highlight with a Spotlight or Flash
If you notice that the flower you are going to photograph is placed in an area with a lot of shade, you can always use accessories such as a reflector, an LED torch or a flash to give it the touch of lighting that it lacks.
The 5 in 1 reflector is the most economical option you will have, it is also very versatile since it has several faces that depends on the light that we can use. From softening it with the diffusing part, to filling the shadows in a warmer or cooler way using its golden or silver part.
But it is true that there will be times when we do not have enough light to reflect, and in these cases this accessory will be of little use. Here a continuous led light torch, or a flash can be our solution to highlight the flower we want to photograph.
Of course, either the torch or the flash what we use, try to ensure that the flash does not come from the same position as the camera. It is better to separate it so as not to flatten the image and thus be able to give it volume. Ideally, you should start by configuring them with the lowest possible power, and increase it as you test and notice that you need it.
Compositions
In all flower photography, two of the most important components are light and composition. We’ve already talked about lighting, so now it’s time to focus on composition. Although we have already discussed many of the tips, some tricks that will work for you are:
Try different types of shots, from macro details of the flower itself, such as including a group of flowers within a landscape.
Look for backgrounds that contrast with the color of the flower, that way you will define what the main motif of the photo is.
Try different frames. Don’t put limits on yourself, and try capturing both horizontal and vertical photos.
Isolate the flower from the background to emphasize your attention to it. You can do this using shallow depths of field.
Change the perspective from which you take your captures.
Lean on the Rule of Thirds to place the center of interest of your photograph.
Add Water Droplets
We told you before that one of the advantages of photographing the flowers during sunrise is that many of them have water droplets due to the morning dew, which gives them a unique touch. But what happens if we can’t take our photos during that moment?
Well, don’t worry, because there is a solution for everything. In this case, what we can do is have a spray bottle of water, and spray the flowers a little. These will come out brighter and much more interesting in your photos.
Includes Insects
Sometimes for your flower photography to be perfect, you will find that something is missing. The icing on the cake, or what we can understand in this case as an insect.
If your photograph is good, adding an insect to it, be it a butterfly, a ladybug, or any other insect, the shot will be doubly good. It will take on more life and will be more natural.
Of course, in order to take this type of shot we must be patient, analyze the environment well and of course be very stealthy so as not to scare the insect away. Shooting in burst mode will also help, as it increases the likelihood of getting a good shot.
