Flower Photography Tips & Techniques

We all love flower photography. They are a beautiful subject for everyone from the amateur to the professional photographer – full of color, texture, patterns and personality, and they are readily available year-round. Whether outdoors in your personal garden or a botanic garden, or indoors in a conservatory, a greenhouse or your home, you can photograph flowers in every season of the year. It might seem that such beautiful subjects, with their luscious colors, graceful curves and interesting patterns could be easily captured – they stay relatively still, after all.  Capturing an adequate documentary image of a flower is easy, but creating an image that conveys emotion, impact and artistry is actually quite difficult. Flower photography like any other form of photography, requires lots of patience and practice.

For stunning flower photography, we have to become completely familiar with the workings of our camera and all the necessary equipment that helps us capture the beauty of flowers. We need to have a good understanding of the basics of photography – composition, light, exposure, aperture, color theory, post processing – all the things that will help us to be a better photographer. Once we become familiar with those aspects of photography, we can focus our attention on the more creative, artistic side. We can learn to slow down, to observe the intricate details that draw our eyes and begin to experiment with the many ways we might successfully capture those details. Do we bring all the details into sharp focus or do we use selective focus to lead the eye and create beautiful blur? How do we compose our subject to bring our story forward, and how will we create a pleasing background to allow our subject to be the star of the show? In addition, when we ask ourselves what we see and how it make us feel we can begin to connect with our subject – to lose ourselves in the curves, the color, the light dancing on our subject that we see in our viewfinder. That connection allows us to more readily bring the beauty of that subject to our viewer’s eyes.

Each flower has it’s own unique personality, its own story to tell and the varieties of flowers to capture are endless. Tulips, waterlilies, orchids, dahlias, to name a few, all hold their unique challenges, but learning to master those challenges can lead to stunning images of one of nature’s finest gifts. Here are some articles on Visual Wilderness to get you started.