Long lenses for flowers

When taking pictures of flowers, most photographers understandably think of using a macro lens. After all, that makes sense. Most flowers are small.

Next time you shoot flowers, though, try another approach. Use a telephoto lens with a minimum focal length of 300mm. The pictures in this article were all taken with a 100- 400mm Canon zoom set to between 300mm and 400mm.

The unique look created by a long lens does two

things. For example, the tulips in the image below appear much closer than they actually are to the purple flowers in the background. The longer the lens, the more compression.

Second, the amount of bokeh -- i.e. blur -- increases significantly especially in conjunction with a large lens aperture and close proximity to the foreground flowers. The increase in bokeh (which is the same as an increase in shallow depth of field) isolates the foreground subjects and makes them stand out dramatically. To fill the frame with a single flower or a small group of flowers, you can add extension

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tubes. These allow you to focus closer than the minimum focusing distance of the lens and, at the same time, produce greater magnification. That increases the bokeh even more. The closeup of the brilliantly colored tulip, below, shows how you can isolate one flower or even a part of a flower this way.

Sometimes a photographer uses this technique but it turns out nothing in the image is tack sharp. If you want to create a complete blur of color where nothing is sharp, that’s fine. However, I feel the better approach is to render at least a small part of the image with tack sharp clarity to give a viewer something to focus on instead of a nondescript blur of color. To do this, make sure the shutter speed is fast enough to produce a sharp picture even while handholding a long lens. If there is absolutely no wind, you can use a tripod and then the shutter doesn’t matter. However, if there is even the slightest amount of wind and/or you’re hand holding a telephoto lens, the shutter speed should be relatively fast.

Use this guideline to determine the shutter speed with a telephoto lens: The shutter should be the reciprocal of the focal length, or faster. In other words, if your focal length is 400mm, the shutter speed must be 1/400th of a second or faster. I like to err on the side of caution, so with a 400mm lens I like to use a shutter speed of 1/640 or 1/800. If a breeze is blowing and the blossoms seem to be dancing all over of the place, I would use 1/1000th of a second at least. Remember, you will be typically shooting wide open to increase the bokeh, which means the light gathering ability of the lens is maximized. This, in turn, allows a fast shutter speed so any movement will be frozen. §