Photographing Blooms

With spring allegedly on the way, despite the ongoing temperatures well below normal here, the spring flower bloom season will be upon us in short order if not already happening where you are.

The biggest challenge with photographing flowers is that flowers are inherently already beautiful, so what can you do to better that? Moreover, they are a popular subject and so how do you make your work stand out from the rest of the stuff that will flood the Internet and Social Media?

Perspective

One way to get out of the flower box as it were is to change perspective. I don’t just mean how you look at things, but perhaps look at the world from the perspective of the flower itself.

Flowers tend to be close to the ground, so to get a flower’s perspective, you need to be close to the ground. Don’t make images looking down on, or down into the flower because there is nothing unique in that and after you’ve seen the tenth image, you’re exhausted and rightly so. Thus get on the ground, and photography at the position of the flower’s eye point of view, as if it had eyes.

Flowers attract other critters, so photograqph the critters from the flower’s perspective.

Flowers tend to point upwards, towards the sky, so lie down beside the flower and photograph upwards as if you were the flower. It you can get in the middle of a bunch of flowers and use a wide angle lens, you can make some very unique images. Don’t forget your polarizing filter.

Put yourself in the position of the flower and you will be making flower photos that don’t like the same as everyone else’s/

From a gear perspective, a tripod with a removable centre column is a bonus so the tripod can get really low. This usually means as well that the legs will splay out flat, which is pretty much a requirement. Your remote control app can get your camera really low, while you don’t have to be. Also nice. I also like to surround the camera with white reflector cards to throw some light back into the shadow areas to emphasize shape and dimension.

If the flowers are affected by wind, take your flash off camera and use fill flash with the higher flash sync speed to balance the flash with whatever light is already present. It can help freeze motion and make the colours pop when they might be naturally dull. Flower petals often have a slight fluorescence that flash reveals where top down sun does not.

Whatever you choose, choose to think different. You’ll be glad that you did.

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NO AI CRAPOLA WAS USED IN THE PRODUCTION OF THIS ARTICLE. THE IMAGE IS LICENSED FROM A HUMAN PHOTOGRAPHER