Strategies for shooting Botanical Gardens

Strategies for shooing Botanical Gardens

Flower photography is a natural extension of Spring, and nowhere is this more rewarding than in botanical gardens. In one location, there are dozens of varieties of colorful and exotic flowers often planted with great artistry. It’s almost as if the gardeners had photographers in mind. It’s easy to take scores of great pictures in a very short time. I’ve photographed world-class gardens all over the world, from Butchart Gardens in British Columbia, Canada, to the Denver Botanical Gardens, and from Garden by the Bay in Singapore to Keukenhof Gardens in Holland, and they always are a delight to experience and photograph. You can spend many hours or even days there.

The strategy

World class floral designs bring world class crowds! The average number of visitors to Keukenhof Gardens from mid-to-late April, for example, is 25,500 people per day, and there are four peak days where an astonish-

ing 45,000 people enjoy the exquisite gardens. How, then, can you take good pictures without all those people ruining the shots?

The answer is simple. Get there early. Buy tickets online, and get in line at the entrance to the garden an hour before they open. No one else will be there and you’ll be the first in line. Yes, it’s boring standing there for an hour, but it will be well worth the inconvenience. At the time the gardens open, show your ticket and then rush into the heart of the great color and design.

For several minutes, you can take landscape shots like you see on this page and on the previous page. Shoot very quickly, take lots of images and, for maximum efficiency, don’t use a tripod. It takes time to set up, to align the camera, and to take the shots. Raise the ISO if necessary, and for the first 10 minutes or so (longer if you’re lucky), don’t do any closeups or macro work. That comes later. For now, shoot wide expanses of flowers -- i.e. landscapes -- devoid of people.

As the minutes pass, more and more people will appear your shots. With a wide angle lens, they will be small in the frame and easily cloned out

in post-processing. With telephoto lenses, you can frame compositions to exclude other visitors. If someone stubbornly stays in one position for several minutes and intereferes with a composition you want, don’t waste time by waiting for them to move. Take the shot and clone them out later. If you spend time waiting for a clear shot, more and more people will be flooding the gardens. It’s easy to clone out one or two people; eliminating a dozen is much more challenging.

When so many people have been admitted to the gardens that wide angle landscape shots are no longer feasible, switch gears. Now focus on groups of flowers composing tight shots. You can use a wide angle lens if you shoot down on the flowers, thus eliminating a distant walkway on the far side of the flowers that may very well be full of people. Use telephoto lenses the same way. Shoot downward and fill the frame with nothing but color as I did in the image above. This was taken with a 90mm focal length.

When the gardens becomes crowded, this is the time for macro photography. Shooting straight down on flowers, like the image below, can be done no matter how many people are there. Switch to a macro lens or use extension tubes on

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a telephoto lens to fill the frame with strong color and, again, it won’t matter how big the crowd is.

Lighting

All botanical gardens are outdoors. In a few cases, they may be under glass in a giant conservatory.. Either way, they are illuminated by natural light.

In most cases, flowers are best photographed in diffused light. Nothing makes pictures of flowers look better than an overcast sky. Even if the cloud cover is dark and brooding, colors in flowers stand out beautifully. Diffused light is by far my favorite way to shoot flowers.

If the sky is hopelessly blue and you’re going to have direct sunlight the entire day, definitely shoot in the early morning and late afternoon. Avoid overhead sunlight. The contrast is harsh and shadows go black with a loss of detail, and the pictures won’t do the flowers justice. You might want to bring a small diffusion panel to diffuse direct sunlight on individual flowers.

Wind

Wind is the enemy of macro photographers,

and it’s also the enemy of landscape photograpers where foregrounds like wild grasses, wildflowers, and leaves are dominant. Botanical gardens are no exception. If you want extensive depth of field, that means small lens apertures in the f/22 to f/32 range. That, in turn, requires relatively longer shutter speeds. A tripod is necessary, and even a slight breeze will cause movement in the subjects; meaning, the images won ‘t be sharp.

If you are going for shallow depth of field, as in the image above, then wind is less of a problem. You’ll be using large lens apertures that permit more light to enter the camera, thus enabling the use of fast shutter speeds.

Extreme bokeh

When wind is a factor, go for extremely shallow depth of field as in the tulip at right. To do this, you need 3 things: A long lens (at least 200mm, but 400mm is better); a large lens aperture (in this case f/5.0); and the lens has to be very close to the flower that is to be sharp. For this tulip shot, my 400mm telephoto was about 3 inches from the flower. In my opinion, most out of focus foregrounds are distracting except in this kind of picture. Here, the flowers in the foreground became a haze of color, completely undefined. §