Summer is the best season to try flower photography. You can find flowers anywhere, from your garden or balcony to the nearest florist shop, park, or botanical garden. Having a great subject matter doesn’t guarantee a good photograph, though. Here are the essential tips to improve your flower photos.
1. Make the Flower the Focal Point of the Composition
When you take photos of flowers, you want them to stand out and be the main character of your photos. However, this doesn’t mean placing the flowers in the center of the frame. While this sometimes works, in many situations, you’ll find that placing the flowers according to the rules of composition is more pleasing to the eye. For example, you may place the flowers according to the rule of thirds and let the petals act as leading lines that draw the eye towards the stamen.
Another way to make flowers the focal point of the composition is to hide a cluttered background using a shallow depth of field. To do this, you need a large aperture (a small f-number), a small camera-subject distance, or telephoto lenses. By having a clear flower and a blurred background, you make the flower stand out. This makes the flower take center stage.
A good piece of advice is to forget the subject once you selected it as something to photograph. Forget that it is a flower. Instead, try to view it as lines, light, colors, and shape. See it as elements for you to arrange as visually pleasing as possible within the viewfinder by trying out different angles and viewpoints.
2. Get Close to Your Subject
Many beginners capture flowers standing and keeping the camera at your eye level. However, you need to get the camera at the flower’s level and show its perspective over the world. Get so close to your subject so you can see its ribs, pollen, and textures. It doesn’t matter if you can’t frame the entire flower. Focus on details and frame the petals, stem, or pestle.
If you want to get even more from your subject, try macro photography. Many flowers are tiny, and you can only capture their details from an extremely short distance. You’ll need a macro lens like the Sigma 105mm or the Nikon NIKKOR Z MC 105 mm to achieve a 1:1 magnification ratio. Macro photography helps you reveal the unseen parts of the world and create outstanding compositions.
3. Favor Colors in Your Composition
Color is an essential feature of flowers, and it should have a special place in your compositions. There is an entire color theory that can help you. For example, you can emphasize a color by choosing a complementary color as a background. You can create a dreamier atmosphere by filling the frame with analogous colors.
Although you can’t change the color of a flower or the natural background, you can change the position of the camera. If you photograph a flower from below, it makes the sky the background. If you photograph a flower from above, it makes the ground the background. Some flower photographers are not satisfied with relying on using a natural background. Instead, they carry their own set of gradient background cards so they can choose the background they prefer.
4. Try to Tell a Story with Your Flower Photography
Don’t forget about storytelling. It will add a new dimension to your photos. While a flower is beautiful by itself, it’s more beautiful in context. Therefore, sometimes it’s worth capturing its surroundings. The environment adds a time component (season or time of the day), location (forest or meadows), or abstract meaning (nature overcoming concrete, or emerging life).
For example, the relationship between the flower and the bee makes the above photo about something more than just the flower. It is now about its role in an ecosystem, luring insects to help it spread pollen by means of its irresistible colors. It opens up the story and interpretations. Don’t worry about being outside the boundaries of flower photography and combine it with animal or insect photography. It can make you appreciate flowers even more.
By widening the frame and including the surroundings, you create more exciting and diverse compositions. Flowers provide symmetries and patterns that can easily fill the frame with surreal shapes and juxtapositions. Make sure you preserve enough negative space and don’t clutter your composition. Also, make sure the flowers are still the main characters and don’t get lost in the scenery. In other words, capture the environment but don’t go too far from the main subject.
5. Learn When and How to use Flash for Flower Photography
Using flash for outdoor flower photography may give you more freedom and help you in difficult situations. Taking photos outdoors doesn’t automatically mean good natural lighting conditions. The flowers you photograph may be in the shadow, under bushes, or in trees. Flash can also help you improve the lighting on sunny days, brightening up the shadows.
Flash illuminates the scene and allows you to freeze the subject and small apertures without compromising ISO values. It also allows you to change the direction and intensity of the light, especially if you use an external flash unit or a dedicated macro flash system).
Reducing flash intensity and illuminating the flower from the side produces natural-looking ambient light. In this way, you can combine natural light with flash and increase the amount of light in the scene without affecting colors and details.
On the contrary, directly illuminating the flower with the full power of flash and a low ISO will overcome natural light and produce a black background.
Here’s what I do to create a natural-looking result by using flash in flower photography:
- I add a diffuser in front of the flash heads to soften the light from the flash
- I put my camera settings at f/8-f/11 and ISO 400 to get enough ambient light for the background. Light from a flash falls off rather quickly, so ISO 400 usually ensures that your background is not turning pitch black.
- For the shutter speed, I set it to the camera’s flash sync speed which is 1/200-1/250s.
Because you often get very close to the flowers, you don’t want the flash to overexpose your main subject so it is a good idea to limit the intensity of the flash. A flash output of 1/64 or 1/32 of its full strength is often enough with the above settings when shooting with a macro flash system.
Flower photography is a very rewarding genre. It creates a strong bond between photographer and subject. Over time, you’ll learn where and when to find the best flowers, blossoming seasons, and behaviors. You’ll appreciate the endless wonders of nature. Furthermore, you’ll never run out of new subjects and inspiration.
