Photographing Flowers

Exploring Macro Worlds with Harold Davis

Harold Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136109812
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Digital Media

Capture stunning macro floral images with this gorgeous guide by acclaimed photographer Harold Davis. You'll learn about different types of flowers, macro equipment basics, and the intricacies of shooting different floral varieties in the field and in the studio.

Harold also shows you techniques in the Photoshop darkroom that can be applied to flower photography to help you get the most out of your images.

Beautiful and authoritative, this guide to photographing flowers is a must-read for every photographer interested in flower photography. Photographing Flowers will also win a place in the hearts of those who simply love striking floral imagery.

Making Flower Photos

Planning

Fortune favors the prepared mind! I repeat this mantra often when I give photography workshops, in my books, and—most of all—when I go out to photograph.

“Okay,” you may say, “Obviously there are some photographic ventures that rely on a great deal of planning. But what’s to plan when I go out into a garden to photograph flowers?”

This is a good question, because one of the joys of flower photography is that it can be done anywhere there are flowers—which is almost everywhere. Flower photography doesn’t require coordination with other people, and is an area of photography in which improvisation really comes to the fore. In the right season, anyone can photograph flowers in their backyard. Out of season, you can buy cut flowers to photograph at a florist, or even a grocery store.

Nonetheless, a great deal of planning can go into flower photography. You are more likely to come away with successful results if you do plan, although I am not suggesting being rigid once you are behind the camera in the field or indoors.

To take the issue of planning flower photography from the top, a good floral photo requires three elements: the subject, location, and camera. Your vision and technique as a photographer serve to glue these three elements together.

The subject is, of course, a flower or flowers. If you are going to use a flower bought from a store, you should know your local suppliers both in terms of quality and expense. Sometimes the two don’t go together from the photographer’s viewpoint; for example, I often prefer to work with inexpensive flowers from Trader Joe’s or Costco.

Before you purchase flowers to photograph, it is smart to know where you will shoot them, with what props, background, and lighting (see pages 130–135 for more about flower photography indoors).

There’s also the question of seasonality. With today’s global economy flowers are flown into florists from the opposite hemisphere, so most likely you can shoot exotic cut flowers even if winter starkly surrounds your homestead.

Outdoors, in a garden or the wilderness, it is a different story. It really helps a great deal to understand what species may be in bloom, and what you should be looking for.

A local horticultural nursery allowed me to photograph this guzmania in one of their greenhouses over a period of several days. The flower is shown here close-up to create an abstract effect—almost as if the petals were big, Halloween candy corn.

Photo: 105mm macro, 3/5 of a second at f/40 and ISO 200, tripod mounted

For more than a week, I watched the course of sunrise as it hit the flowers in my garden. My idea was to capture the light of dawn within the scale of a very small flower, namely this tiarella. The flower was low to the ground (maybe 3" tall from bottom to top) and planted mostly in the shade where selective sun rays only hit it briefly.

Lying on my stomach on the ground, coffee mug beside me, I waited patiently (more or less) for sunrise. The camera was hand held, with a vibration reduction zoom lens used at 200mm in terms of focal length. I added a 12mm extension tube and a +4 diopter close-up filter to the lens. As the sun hit the flower, I snapped a series of photos that are about the play of light and depth-of-field.

Photo: 200mm, 12mm extension tube, +4 close-up filter, 1/400 of a second at f/8 and ISO 200, hand held

If you are going to be shooting in a garden that is not your own, for example a botanical garden, check to see what rules about photography apply. Can you use a tripod? There are often regulations that prohibit using tripods in public gardens, but I’ve found that these can sometimes be waived if you apply in advance.

Light, and lighting, are crucial to photography. Indoors or outdoors, planning ahead for likely weather and lighting conditions is a great idea. Although you often can’t predict outdoor weather, you can understand in advance what weather conditions would be ideal.

Thinking about the lighting conditions you may encounter will help you understand what equipment to bring both in terms of your camera, and if you want to supplement natural lighting on location.

Spending some time considering conditions in the context of the images you might like to make can also help you pick the best time of day for a given location.

For more about lighting in the great outdoors and flower photography, see pages 120–127.

This Bromeliad is located in a remote corner of Blake Garden, a university teaching garden located in Kensington, California. I watched the plant over a number of seasons to try to understand when it would be in full flower, and finally caught it at peak bloom.

Photo: 105mm macro, 1.3 seconds at f/32 and ISO 200, tripod mounted

Choosing a Lens

Just as choice of paintbrush helps decide what a painter can paint, a lens controls the possibilities that a photographer can capture. Don’t get me wrong: a brush is a tool, and a lens is a tool. In both cases, the tool helps to frame a painter or photographer’s vision of the world—but the vision must come from within.

Different kinds of flower photography are best done with different kinds of lenses, but the good news is that unless you want to get really, really close you don’t need expensive and specialized equipment.

A normal angle of view, meaning what most people see, is about 43 degrees. The effective angle of view of a camera lens depends upon the focal length of the lens as well as the size of the sensor used for capturing light. For digital cameras with sensors the size of a frame of 35mm film, a 50mm lens provides roughly the normal angle of view. How this works on your camera depends upon the sensor size and its ratio to a 35mm film frame (check your manual for this information).

Generally, a shorter focal length means the lens has a wider angle of view and can therefore be used to capture a wide view of the world. Lenses with this property are called wide-angle lenses. Wide-angle lenses are great if you want to capture an extensive garden view, or perhaps if you want a shot with one flower in the foreground and others back behind it.

Conversely, lenses with a longer focal length are known as telephoto lenses and bring you closer to your subject. Another way of saying the same thing is that these lenses provide a narrower angle of view. Telephoto lenses are great for capturing flowers from a distance when you can’t get close to your subject, and also if you want to isolate a flower from everything else in the background.

Zoom lenses cover a range of many focal lengths, in some cases from wide angle to telephoto.

I photographed this Icelandic poppy (Papaver nudicaule) using a Lensbaby. The Lensbaby is a special purpose lens designed so that the photographer can control which part of the photo is in focus. The in-focus area is called the sweet spot.

My idea with this photo was to have the flower core in focus, and to allow the petals to go out of focus. This made for a very painterly overall effect.

Photo: Lensbaby using f/8 aperture ring, 1/125 of a second at ISO 200, hand held

Many compact digital cameras provide a zoom lens with a range of focal lengths—so you can photograph flowers from nearer or further away. Most compact digital cameras also allow you to focus close-up using a special macro mode.

More generally, to say that a lens is a macro lens means that it is especially designed for close-up work, and comes into its own for this kind of photography. Macro lenses, covered further on pages 70–77, are very helpful if you want to explore the worlds of close-up flower photography.

Even if you don’t have a macro lens, there are a number of fairly inexpensive ways to equip your Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera with interchangeable lenses so that it can shoot closer and get the flower photos of your dreams. I recommend and often use extension tubes and close-up filters (see pages 78–83 for more information)!

Looking closely at this zinnia, I saw what seemed to be a series of interlocking small flowers merged into the larger petals of the blossom. My idea with this photo was to capture these “inner” flowers romantically and softly.

Photo: Lensbaby using a f/5.6 aperture ring and +10 close-up filter, 1/200 of a second at ISO 200, hand held

My idea with this shot was to isolate this tiny tiarella flower from its surroundings using a longer lens.

Photo: 200mm, 36mm extension tube, 1/20 of a se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Why Photograph Flowers?
• The Worlds of Flower Photography
• Making Flower Photos
• The Bee’s Eye View
• Flowers in the Digital Darkroom
• Notes & Resources
• Glossary
• Index