This article assumes you are using a digital camera, although much of the article still applies if you are using film. The first part (tips 1 to 6) applies equally whether you have a fully automatic ’point and shoot’ camera or a sophisticated SLR. The second part is a lot more technical (but still readable I hope!) and assumes you have some level of manual control with your camera. [Hover your mouse over any image to see a tooltip with details of the photo.]

1. Direction and quality of light

Assuming you are photographing flowers outdoors using daylight, some of the lighting possibilities are: sharp light or soft light (i.e. clear sunlight or cloudy); low angle or high angle or in between (sun near horizon or high overhead); lighting falling on the face of the flower, on the back, or from the side. All of these possibilities will dramatically affect how your flower will look. Fortunately flowers, unlike say animals or small children, stay still, and thus you can explore how light will affect your subject by walking around it and observing it from different angles. (This might also involve lying on the ground!)

Bear in mind though that the human visual system has a bias towards making things appear consistent, rather that reporting reality. Your brain does a great deal of interpretation of the information it receives from your eyes before you ’see’ an image. Thus unless you are really paying attention a tree tends to look the same, no matter what angle you look at it from (because your mind is more interested in the ’treeness’ of it, than how the colour of the leaves or blossoms appear to change when viewed from slightly different angles).

Cameras don’t suffer from this problem though, so until you get used to looking closely at the relationship of light to your subject, you can assist yourself by taking several shots from different directions and angles and reviewing them on the camera or at home, in order to help you get used to seeing the differences. Notice that bright sunlight produces hard edges, sharp shadows, and high contrast between lights and darks. However it can also ’wash out’ the colour from a scene, leave it looking flat (part of the reason why photographers often shoot early in the morning or late in the evening). Cloudy skies can also make landscapes look drab, but colours are richer, shadows are soft or non-existent, and the range from bright to dark is lower, making it easier to get good exposure across an image. Backlight (light shining from behind (and hence through) something towards the camera can be very effective for translucent subjects like petals or leaves, revealing their structure and their delicacy. The trunk of a backlit tree however becomes a dark silhouette against a washed out background, detail and colour of the bark is lost. Side lighting on deeply corrugated bark is great, as the shadows reveal the texture of the bark, whereas direct lighting flattens it again.

Experience light, pay attention to it. When you’re outside (with or without your camera) and something catches your eye, say the way a tree looks, stop and analyse the scene. Is the quality of the light contributing to what you see? If so, as you move around the subject what is interesting in the scene is likely to change. Or is it something about the form or colour that caught your eye? This is practicing seeing, and I strongly suspect that it is the ability to ’see’ well that makes a good photographer, much more so than the type of camera hanging around his or her neck.

2. Grass, debris, insects and other distractions

The mind interprets; the camera just reports. When you look at a beautiful flower in the landscape, you generally don’t register the grass around it, the damaged petal, the broken leaf, etc. - you see the flower. In order to see the detail you have to actively examine the scene. This is one of the reasons why pro shots look so much better than our snapshots - pros see things that we don’t. Have you ever taken a photograph of something you thought was amazing and then got home and realised there was a really ugly building in one corner, or telephone wires right across the sky? Pros notice things like that and will carefully position themselves and compose the shot to avoid such distractions in an image.

The flower shot equivalent is to get home and realise that that beautiful orchid picture you took has a big blade of grass in front of the flower, or that there’s detritus around the flower that distracts the eye from the main subject. Again, take your time. Having chosen your subject and where to shoot from, look through the lens and see what else is in the frame. Do you need to gently move some grass aside, blow away some dead leaves? Maybe take a few frames and look at them in close up on your camera display.

Not all distractions are necessarily bad. I have often got home to find that my flowers had passengers: ants, ladybirds, spiders, etc. Insects help to indicate scale in a picture, can enliven a rather monotone image, or can be interesting sub-subjects in their own right. Consider making use of them, if there are insects around, before you shoo them away. Similarly you may like to have leaves, or grass stems or whatever in your shot. Each to his own. What is important is to be aware of what you’re shooting and to actively choose what elements you want to keep.

3. Quality of flower; whole plant or not

This is quite close to the item above. When you photograph a flower, think about why you are photographing it. For example, it may be that you are interested in the artistic qualities of the image, in which case the flower itself may be less important than the scene as a whole, the nuances of light and shade, etc. Alternatively you might want to record the flower. Then you may be more interested in ensuring that the flower is complete, at the right stage of bloom, that its shape and/or colour is well represented, and so on. Or perhaps you want to record the flower so you can look it up when you get home. Then you may need to ensure your photograph encompasses the whole plant, or that you photograph the leaves as well as the flower heads. (For example, the flowers of some orchids vary dramatically in colour and size making it hard to identify the species from flower alone. With the leaves as well however, identification becomes much easier.)

Knowing why you want to photograph a flower helps you choose both the flower (or flowers) and the setting. Sometimes you may have a lot of choices sometimes fewer. I’ve only seen four Fly Orchids in the Burren, but there are a *lot* of Spring Gentians around in April. Sometimes it’s worth wandering around a bit, looking at different flowers. Some may be more closed or more open, grouped or single, taller, shorter, and so on. The first one that catches your eye may not be the best for your purposes.

4. Background

Having tidied up the scene (if required) and decided what flower and what part of the flower to photograph, it’s time to consider the background. Sometimes you might not have much choice, but if you do, then actively choose, rather than have the background be an accident. Consider: you can shoot from high to low, so that the background is the ground around the flower; from low to high, looking up at the flower so that background is the sky; or level with the flower, background is other flowers or grasses around it. You may be able to position yourself so that the background is shadows or dark material - good for emphasising white or lightly coloured flowers. Or choose a bright or pale background to contrast a strong or richly coloured one.

In general, unless you specifically want the background to say something in the image (for example, a back drop of tree trunks behind woodland bluebells), you want the background to complement the subject in colour and content. That is to say, if the background has a lot of detail or something interesting happening, the viewer’s eye is drawn away from the subject and the image is less strong. Similarly, if the background contains strong colours, colours that clash with the subject, or there isn’t much difference between the subject and the background, then again the image is weakened.

5. Framing

Composition is about things like what elements you include or exclude when you point your camera at a subject, where the key subject is positioned within the frame, and so on. There are lots of good articles on the web and books about composition all of which help you see what matters in composition, but none of which can tell you how to compose any given image. That is your job as a photographer and something for you to develop as your style. Framing is something simpler.

What do you want to do with the image you’re about to take? Print it and frame it? Keep it on your computer? Use it on a website? Considering that the flower is central to the image we usually want it to take up most of the frame, and since flowers are typically taller than they are wide, we will often shoot in portrait orientation with a bit of space around the top, bottom, left and right of the flower. And that’s fine if the only shape you’re ever going to want this image in is portrait, i.e. higher than it is broad. On the other hand if you were making a website about flowers, most computer displays are wider than they are long and so if you want to maximise the size of an image on screen without making the person viewing it scroll up or down, you’ll want to use a landscape format image. Also you may want at least one version of your photo with some dead space in it for text to go on later.

6. Wind

One thing you notice when you start photographing flowers is that a) they blow around in the wind a lot, and b) it’s always windy enough to blow flowers around. A problem that doesn’t arise when photographing, say, buildings or people. Or dinosaurs. Any sort of breeze may make it hard for you frame your subject or keep it in focus or use a long exposure. Depending on where you are in the world there may be times of the day that are less windy. In Ireland, dawn and dusk are often the calmest parts of the day. You can also use something to shelter your subject (backpack, your body, your jacket on some sticks). Or just be patient; the wind constantly varies in speed and if you’re patient there are usually lulls that are considerably quieter during which you can get your shots, if you have everything ready.

Read Part 2 - Technical Stuff