This article goes into more technical considerations for flower photography and assumes you have some degree of control over settings such as aperture, shutter speed and ISO. The first part (tips 1 to 6) is more general and applies equally whether you have a fully automatic ’point and shoot’ camera or a sophisticated SLR. [Hover your mouse over any image to see a tooltip with details of the photo.]

7. Depth of Field

Depth of field is the amount of a given scene that is in reasonably sharp focus. Look online if you want a detailed technical explanation, but basically if you focus your camera’s lens on an object one metre away then everything on that plane (1 metre from the plane of the camera’s film or sensor) is in perfect focus. Things slightly in front of or slightly behind that plane are so nearly in perfect focus that humans can’t tell the difference (or don’t notice). As objects get further from that plane they become gradually more blurred to the point were we start to notice. Depth of field (DOF) refers to how far in front or behind the plane of perfect focus that an object can be before we start to see it as out of focus.

DOF is mainly affected by aperture; aperture controls the amount of light that enters the camera. (Aperture is the size of the hole through which light is let in to the camera.) Decreasing the aperture (higher f number, smaller hole, less light enters camera) increases DOF, until (theoretically) as the aperture become infinitely small (pin hole sized) the DOF becomes infinitely deep (everything is in focus). So why not just always use a very small aperture? Because less light means longer exposure and if the exposure get too long, your flower may blow around and then everything will be blurred. Note: there’s a big difference between blur (because the camera moved or the subject moved during the exposure); and lack of focus (because some part of the subject wasn’t in focus).

Depth of field is also affected by subject to lens distance. Specialist macro lenses allow one to focus on a subject when it is very close to the front of the lens. With my 100mm macro lens I can focus on objects 10cm from the lens. With a 100mm fixed lens the closest subject I can focus on would be about a metre away. So (very roughly speaking) the macro lens allows me to get close enough to the subject to make it ten times bigger in the image.

The downside is that as the subject gets closer to the lens, depth of field starts to decrease and can decrease dramatically for subjects very close to the lens. So when photographing something like a butterfly or fly up close, if you focus on the eyes then it’s quite possible for the eyes to be in sharp focus and most of the body to be out of focus; in other words, the DOF is only a few millimetres.

Shallow DOF isn’t necessarily bad. DOF is often deliberately used by photographers to emphasise a subject. If only the subject is in focus and the background is blurred out, then the image as a whole has a very strong emphasis on the subject. However if you are trying, say, to capture the detail of a flower’s petals you need to be able get sufficient DOF to do so.

You have four options:

If there’s enough light just set the aperture you need, check the DOF either with a test shot or by pressing the aperture preview button on your camera (if it has one), and you’re done.

What if the aperture you need means a shutter speed slower than you can handhold the camera for, e.g 1/60 of a second or less? Then you can put the camera on a tripod and either use a cable release or the self timer to take the shot without shaking the camera. This works well, as long as your subject isn’t blowing around in the wind. If it’s moving a lot it may be out of shot completely; and even if it’s only moving a little, at slow shutter speeds you’ll end up with a blurred image.

If your camera allows it you can increase the ISO setting. This will allow you to achieve the same DOF but with a faster exposure. Most digital SLRs can comfortably shoot in good light with little or no noise at ISO 800 or even higher. This is also a good option if you haven’t a tripod.

Finally, if you’re using a macro lens and varying the above factors still doesn’t get you the DOF you need, consider moving back from your subject. I used to always fill the frame with my subjects when shooting macro, assuming more detail was always better. But if you have very little DOF then there won’t be a lot of detail (depending on the physical shape of your subject and its orientation to the lens). Backing off (increasing subject to lens distance) gives you more DOF and you can always crop the image afterwards. Okay, if you want a very high resolution image to make a very large print from then you need as much resolution as you can get. However if your camera takes say a 4000 x 3000 pixel image, but you want the picture for a website, then you probably only need 800 x 600 (only 1/25th of the available resolution). In other words you could probably be two to three times further away from the subject, still get all the resolution you need, and achieve much greater DOF without compromising shutter speed.

The best way to understand this is to pick a small subject and (ideally with your camera on a tripod) shoot the same at a whole range of apertures. You can also experiment with different size subjects, different subject to lens distances, and different ISO settings. This is one of the fantastic things about digital photography - it costs nothing to experiment endlessly and you can see the results immediately! For a period I used to religiously shoot certain subjects at every aperture from 2.8 to 28, going up in 2 stop increments, to be sure of getting the DOF I wanted (because it’s quite hard to see DOF in the little on-camera display). But I’m not quite as uptight now...

8. Tripods, Shutter Releases and Mirror Lockup

The tripod is your friend. Tripods are almost essential for certain types of photography and there are endless opinions on them out on the web, so I will limit this to considerations if you are getting a tripod for photographing flowers or outdoor macro work.

If you’re going to be carrying this on long hikes, think about weight. Heavy tripods are more stable, light tripods are (much!) more expensive. If it’s going to live in the boot of the car, then weight maybe isn’t an issue.

How low can you go? Flowers are usually small so you need a tripod that allows you to get close to the ground. Tripod specs will indicate minimum height. Even if the legs can fold all the way out to horizontal, you may still be limited by the height of the central shaft. (Since the maximum height of my tripod was above my head I hacksawed off part of the central column to allow me to use it close to the ground.) Experiment in a shop with different designs. My tripod has a reversable centre shaft, so you can have the camera hanging under the tripod. This allows you to get very close to the ground but then you have to put your head through the legs of the tripod to get to the viewfinder, and the tripod head controls can get jammed against the legs. Not ideal...

Some tripods have centre shafts that can rotate 90 degrees to the side, especially for macro work. I haven’t used one, but they look good. Consider the head controls also. When you are dealing with very small things you really need fine, gradual adjustment. My tripod head has controls of the loosen-off, move, tighten-up variety - great for rapid large adjustments, crap for small ones. Especially as often when you tighten the controls up there tends to be a small amount of position change, which can move a small subject out of shot or out of composition.

Consider using a bean bag for on the ground work. Also, if your camera has a flip out display that can be rotated around, you may not need to get your eye down to the ground to see through the viewfinder. These displays are great for low level work, but unfortunately not found on most DSLRs.

A shutter release cable always seemed like an expensive luxury to me (couldn’t I use the self timer instead?) until I gave in and bought one. They’re very handy and they have a sort of positive feel that I prefer over a remote control. They’re fun for portraits and they’re great for shooting lightning at night too!

If you’re shooting very long exposures to get DOF (or for whatever reason), and your camera supports it, consider using mirror lock-up. Read about it online, this article is WAY too long already.

9. White Balance

All light is not the same. A truly white subject (e.g. a piece of white paper with no hint of green, yellow, blue, etc.) appears white to us regardless of whether we view it in sunlight, under cloudy skies, or indoors under tungsten or flourescent light. This is because our visual systems have built in mechanisms for adapting to changing light conditions. It may be that our visual systems are optimised for recognising things (as opposed to merely seeing them) and thus it is more important that a thing looks the same in different conditions of lighting, than that we see it as it actually is.

Cameras, however, do no such interpretation. They can only ‘see things as they are’. Thus white paper under sunlight looks white to a camera, but under tungsten light has a yellowish cast, under flourescent will look colder, bluish, etc. When cameras used film, the film was specially made for certain light conditions. Thus there was film for sunny, outdoors shots; film to use with a flash, and so on. The film was made such that the colours would appear as we would expect to see them, if used in the correct light.

Modern digital cameras also adapt for different lighting conditions. This is called white balance. Basically the camera makes an assessment of the scene, picks what it thinks (in the scene) is neutral (i.e. pure grey or white) and uses this reference to decide what sort of light is present. For example, if what it thinks should be white appears yellowy, then it can infer that the light is yellowy. It then adjusts the white balance so that what should be white appears as white in the image.

Most of the time this all happens automatically and works fine, so why should we care about it? Well, you may care if you want to accurately reproduce the colour of the flower you are photographing. If you shoot a close-up of a red flower so that most of the frame is red, the camera may have difficulty making a good assessment of the white balance required because it’s hard for it to assess what is neutral in the frame. Similarly a white orchid surrounded by green grass may appear green (because of reflected green light from the grass), and it’s a hard scene for a camera to assess automatically.

The hardcore solution is to bring a neutral gray card with you and take a picture of that at the same time as you photograph the flower. Then when you get back home the card gives you a reference from which you can accurately assess the lighting. Note that you must shoot the card at the same time and in the same conditions as the flower. If the flower shot is in full sunshine but a cloud moves over the sun by the time you shoot the card, you are in very different lighting conditions.

If I’m not toting a card around and am concerned about the accuracy of colour in a particular shot, then a quick solution that I think works well is to step back and photograph the general scene. Good cameras are very, very sophisticated these days and I think that given a scene with a good range of colour they generally make a pretty accurate assessment of white balance. So the general scene can be used as a reference when you get back home to calibrate the specific flower shot. Remember that the problem generally arises because you are shooting a subject that is predominantly one or two colours.

Footnote: all of the above is kind of irrelevant if you are shooting in jpeg (because your camera may ‘enhance’ the image by upping the contrast or saturation automatically) or if you are viewing images on a non-calibrated monitor or a monitor set to high contrast (because your monitor is making the image look different and you have no objective reference) - but that is another whole article in its own right!.

10. Metering and Exposure

If you use an external light meter, then you should’ve stopped reading this article long, long ago. If not, you’re using the light meter built into your camera, as 99% of us do. If your camera doesn’t offer you any metering options, then you can stop reading now. If it does then you should consider whether using different metering modes can help with flower photography.

This problem is similar to the one above. In general, a modern camera will make an excellent assessment of a scene and can choose an optimum exposure for it. Of course, ‘optimum’ might not be what you like (I’m fond of underexposing) but the camera can only try to give you its best guess. The camera will (in general) sample many parts of the scene and from this make an assessment of what exposure setting (aperture plus shutter speed) will ensure that, if possible, both the very dark bits and the very bright bits are appropriately exposed to show detail.

This isn’t always possible. For example if you shoot towards the sun the camera does not have sufficient range to keep detail in the sky (requires a very short shutter speed/small aperture) and the ground (requires long shutter speed/large aperture). This is why skies are often washed out (white) in landscape shots, if the dark landscape is correctly exposed.

Again, why do we care? Well, if you’re shooting a single object that occupies a lot of the frame, the camera may fail to make a good assessment of the exposure required. Or (more correctly) it makes a perfectly accurate assessment, just not an appropriate one for the subject. Thus if you shot a white flower that fills the frame a camera will tend to under expose. Conversely a small white flower against a dark green background will tend to be over exposed, and the detail of the flower will be washed out.

How do you fix this? First, you have a digital camera, so get used to looking at your pictures after you take them and, if necessary, zooming in to check that there is detail where you want it. Second, if your camera supports spot metering, try using that. Spot metering meters on a very small part of the scene (at the centre), thus it works very well for the small white flower on a dark background. Remember though that if you compose the shot with the flower off centre, it will meter on the dark background! (But you should be able to meter first, then re-compose.)

Thirdly, use the histogram on your camera’s display (if it has one). If the histogram is bunched to the left, the scene is under-exposed and/or mostly dark; if bunched to the right, over-exposed and/or mostly bright. (Note - neither is necessarily bad, just be sure it is what you want.) Fourthly, fix it afterwards. Your photo editing software of choice will allow you some degree of control over exposure after the fact (a good deal if you shoot in raw), don’t be afraid to use it. However software cannot create detail that isn’t there, thus if the highlights are ‘blown out’ (no detail), no amount of fiddling in software will bring the detail back. Fifthly, bracket...

11. Bracket, bracket, bracket

When professional photographers used film they would often ‘bracket’ a shot. Having selected the correct exposure they would take the shot, then increase the aperture one stop, shoot again, then decrease it one stop (from the original), and shoot again. Having one slightly over- and one slightly under-exposed frame covered their bases. It could also be done quickly (when practiced); more quickly than making a detailed metering of the scene and trying to decide on the optimum.

Digital ‘film’ is effectively free. Don’t be afraid to take lots of shots, while varying the shutter speed, or aperture. You can bracket for depth of field as well as for exposure. (You could even bracket for white balance if you really wanted to!). Not only is bracketing good for helping achieve the shot you want, it may also show you shots that you didn’t initially see in the scene. Personally, I think many images are improved by a degree of under- or over-exposure (depending on the subject). Similarly, depth of field can radically change what we see and how our eye is led when we view an image. Until you are experienced enough to see in your mind the image you want to capture and then set your camera to do exactly that, experimenting is a great way to open your eye to the many possibilities in image making.

12. Practice, practice, practice

For me there are two parts to photography: the technical bit and ‘what I like’. If you know what you like in an image, what you want to photograph and how you would like it to look, then you need to master the technical expertise to enable you to produce the image you see in your mind. If you don’t have some understanding of exposure (shutter speed + aperture + ISO), depth of field, the different qualities of light and how they affect subjects, framing, composition - the mechanics of photography - then it will be hard for you get the image you want. Even with a good mastery of technique, it may still be hard get the image you want, but it is quite likely to be impossible, if you don’t understand what effect, say, aperture has on an image.

To master the technical bit you need to practice. It says it everywhere in everything you read about photography: to take better photographs go out and take lots of photographs and then look at them and learn from them. The great blessing of digital photography is that we amateurs can now take thousands of (mostly crap!) photographs and all it costs us is time. By reviewing your photographs you can learn a lot, both about the technical bit and about what you (as a photographer) like in an image. And by physically taking lots of photographs you become intimate with your camera, you know where all the settings are and can get to them and set them quickly (assuming you aren’t shooting solely in point-and-press mode).

One winter I decided to sort out, cull and catalogue my flower pictures. I had maybe six or seven thousand at that point. I decided to keep three of each species, a few hundred at most in total. Forcing myself to choose three only of each taught me a lot. First you have to review and cull all the dross (why are these images dross? what are the mistakes I repeatedly make? how can I avoid making them in the future?). Then you have to narrow down the remaining selection (what’s left is at least technically okay, or has something interesting happening - of these, which are the good ones? why should I keep them?) to a shortlist. Then choose the three best to keep (best in what sense? artistically? technically? what exactly makes this picture better than that one?). It’s tough, and it takes time, but you learn.

For example, forced to choose between two pictures, you may ‘instinctively’ prefer one over the other. But unless you can really *look* and see *exactly* what one has that the other doesn’t, you will never be able to actively seek that key element when you go out to take your next picture.

Get a good grasp of the technical stuff. Go out and shoot the same flower (or whatever) a hundred times (different angles, background, exposures, composition); review, learn. If you don’t understand depth of field, photograph a bunch of flowers in your kitchen with every aperture setting on your camera and look at the results. You will immediately ‘get’ DOF. Do the same for exposure. Cull ruthlessly. Any idiot can take 10,000 photographs of flowers and get 5 good ones (I do it myself all the time!). The trick is to take 100 and get 10 good ones. By learning to cull the crap, you learn to isolate what is good; by learning what makes an image look good to you, you can learn to actively seek those qualities when you press the shutter.