Flower photography

F l o w e r P h o t o g r a p h y

It’s Spring again, and a photographer can’t help but be drawn to taking pictures of flowers. The colors, shapes, and intricate details are visually compelling. Even if nature photography is not your calling, it must be hard to resist capturing this kind of beauty.

Wide angle lenses

Flower photography is not just about macro. Closeups of flowers are great, of course, but shooting fields of flowers also involves wide angle and telephoto lenses as well. For example, I took the photo of the wild lupine field, below, in Switzerland with a 17mm wide angle lens. For the portrait above of a white ladyslipper on the forest floor in Michigan I used a 200mm telephoto to isolate the flower and render the

background completely out of focus. My point is, when you are in the field intent on shooting flowers, you’ll want to bring a range of lenses to be prepared for many different kinds of scenarios.

Another wide angle shot is shown below. I photographed these Texas bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush near Austin with a 16mm lens in sunrise light. Notice the complete depth of field. This is landscape photography, and in my opinion, virtually without exception, landscapes should be sharp from the immediate foreground to the distant background. The reason we photograph nature is not to blur it. It is to reveal the wonderful detail with tack sharp clarity. Therefore, small lens apertures like f/22 and f/32 are required unless you do focus stacking. Wide angle lenses inherently have extensive depth of field, but when you place the lens close to foreground elements you will need the small aperture to insure everything is sharp. By focusing 3 to 6 feet from the camera you’ll maximize depth of field.

For maximum drama when using wide angle lenses, position the camera very close to the foreground. This is especially effective when the flowers are growing close together and you can’t see a lot of dirt. On the next page, the dazzling display of flowers in Keukenhof Gardens near Lisse, Holland, filled the frame in a unique way -- they seem to be radiating out from the bottom center of the frame. This composition was highly distorted by the 14mm lens I used, but the width of the lens was very effective in capturing a strong design. In this case, ‘distortion’ is not a pejorative word. I positioned the camera about two feet from the flowers in the immediate foreground. Because I was so close to the flowers, I used f/32 to insure everything was as sharp as possible.

Telephoto lenses

I photographed the white fence and the field of flowers at right with a 200mm focal length lens. Notice how the elements are compressed. This is a completely different look when compared to wide angle photography.

Similarly, I took the picture of California poppies on page 11 with a 400mm telephoto. Notice how the rolling hills seem to compress https://www.jimzuckerman.com/peru-phototour1 with little space between them. This is an optical illusion, of course, due to the long lens. Also notice that everything is sharp. Had either the foreground or background been even slightly soft, I would have considered it a failure. I took this picture at f/32. lenses. Many telephotos have close-focusing capabilities that allow you to fill the frame with an individual flower or a group of flowers. This means the working distance between the lens and the subjects is short, typically 2 to 5 feet. When you use a telephoto like this, depth of field is significantly reduced and you can expect backgrounds that will be blurred. In this situation, the strategy is to isolate the flower so

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all of the attention is focused on it. The out of focus background serves to compliment the subject as well as to draw attention to it. The orchid at right is an example of this, and so are the tulips, below.

Macro capability

If your telephoto lens doesn’t focus closely, or even if it does and you want it to act like a telephoto macro lens, you can use one or more extension tubes between the lens and the camera body. I use the Kenko brand that consists of three tubes. These are essentially spacers without glass, so quality isn’t degraded at all. By stacking all three extension tubes between the lens and body, you will be able to focus extremely close. Using one or two tubes allows you to focus closely but not as close as using all three.

Moving in very close to a flower with either a typical macro lens (such as a 50mm macro) or a telephoto macro lens with or without extension tubes means the depth of field will be very shallow. The greater the magnification, the more shallow the DOF becomes. The picture at right of the winecup flower I found in Texas shows both the foreground and background out of focus with all the attention directed at the flower. I shot this with a 50mm macro lens with no extension tubes, and I used an f/11 aperture so I had enough depth of field on the flower to show its detail.

Without exception, I don’t like out of focus foregrounds -- typical of macro and telephoto lenses -- unless the elements in the foreground are so undefined that they become a haze of color. The tulip below is an example. The pink haze creates an ethereal environment that adds mood to the image. To create this kind of look,

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I took the photo with a 100-400mm lens at 400mm, used a large aperture -- f/5.6 in this case -- and the camera was just 3 feet from the flower. In addition, the flowers that caused the pink haze were 2 to 4 inches from the front of the telephoto. That insured they would be so out of focus that they’d be completely undefined. To make sure the lens didn’t focus on any other tulip other than the subject, I turned the AF off and focused the lens manually.

Black backgrounds

Placing a black background behind one or more flowers is beautiful and dramatic. I prefer using velvet as the fabric because it absorbs light like no other fabric does. The black color makes the flower really stand out and, at the same time, it offers a stark and bold backdrop to the colorful subject. You can see in the shot of the columbine, below, how effective this The black background can be used outdoors, of course, and it can also be used indoors. For most flower photography, I prefer soft and diffused light. Outdoors, an overcast sky is my ideal. For indoor photography, I prefer nondirectional window lighting such as the light coming from a north-facing window. This is the easiest type of light to use, it’s free, and you can see exactly how the light falls on the flower.

The Wind

Wind is the enemy of flower photographers. Even the slightest breeze will cause unsharp images with closeups. There are basically two things you can do to overcome the wind: 1) Use a fast shutter speed, or 2) wait for the wind to subside. You can also use flash if you don’t mind the look of artificial light. §

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