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Flower Photography Techniques Revealed

There are many flower photography techniques that can improve your shots.

As with other wildlife, the modern photography technology means there are plenty of technically correct images out there. There are several approaches to getting a unique image however, so let's have a look.

Know Your Flowers

Just as with animal wildlife, knowing your subject is useful. Each species has different flowering times. Flowers may not be at their best towards the end of a flowering period. Get a good plant field guide to let you know what habitats your target flowers thrive in.

Set your alarm clock

For some one of the less enjoyable flower photography techniques!

You might not like getting up for early mornings, but you’ll love the quality of light it gives your flower photos. You’ll also find that the flowers look their best as they’ve not been wilted from the day’s sun

Cloudy close ups

The golden light of dawn is nice, but cloudy days can be good as well. If bright and overcast you’ll have perfect low contrast conditions for some close up detail shots. Getting so close mean s even the slightest breeze has a flower swaying across your viewfinder, so I use a Plamp.

It’s an ingenious little device that clamps from your tripod leg onto a flower to hold it steady. It’s like having a spare hand. Be careful applying the clamp as it’s easy to damage small flowers.

Photographing Plants And Scenery

Flowers make a pleasing addition to a landscape photograph. I often try to use flowers as foreground interest to lead the eye into the picture.

Close up flower portraits are nice but sometimes it's good to show the environment the flowers are growing in. Flowers in landscapes.

Emphasise Something Other Than Color

Many flowers are colorful but this is just one aspect that can be highlighted in a photograph. Try having some fun with some black and white flower photography techniques. Or perhaps you have some existing flower shots that could be approached differently in your editing software? By removing color, black and white places more attention towards texture and shape (not to mention the nice nostalgia of days of black and white film).

The Unwanted Grey Flower

Your camera is fooled by flowers that are mainly white. The metering system sees all the white and tries to do it's job and underexpose. This results in a grey looking flower.

Always look at the histogram when setting exposure in the field. A glance at this one shows why the flower is too dark. The pixels are all over to the left.

Unfortunately the camera doesn't know that the flower is supposed to be white. You have to tell it this by over exposing. In this case I overexposed by one stop. Now the flower will be captured in it's true white color:

This is how the flower really looked and it shows in the histogram. The pixels are now evenly spread. There are more pixels on the right side (the whiter area).

The reverse is true for a dark plant. The camera would try to make it lighter. To keep it dark under expose.

The histogram is your only reliable exposure checker.

The lcd screen on the back of your camera is fine for composition checks but it doesn't show accurate exposure.

The exception is the blinking highlights feature. This is where the image flashes in over exposed areas. This blinking shows you have over exposed this part of the image and it has become white with no detail.

If you've enjoyed these flower photography techniques please check out more pages.

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orchid photography