Tag Archives: flowers

Photographing Wildflowers in my Garden

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DSCF7336I like to joke that I’m part hobbit, because in addition to the often unplanned adventures that I find myself on, I also have a special fondness for things close to home like music, laughter, good food, beer and cheer, and things that grown in my garden. Plus I’m a little short.

Whether it be growing the greens and vegetables that we eat all summer alongside the salmon that we catch, I also love the random, freeform, whispy colors of wildflowers that grow in our yard. Few things at home bring me such visual comfort and pleasure as stepping out the door and seeing a mass of bright orange poppies or watching pollen drunk bees dart in and out of the borage.

Occasionally I delve in and try to capture these colors with my camera. A couple years ago I hauled a couple of speed lights and big softbox into the yard and got some very nice results! Often, I like to shoot them as closeups. My little Fujifilm X20 (which has just been updated to the X30) is perfect for this, because it has an incredible macro mode that focuses up to 1cm away. It’s by far the best built-in macro capability that I’ve ever seen on any camera.

Crouching down in the grass, I try to get as close as possible. However, if I get too close, sometimes I start to see the shadow of the camera on the plant and have to back off a little bit. I’m not using a tripod here, just handholding and doing my best to be sharp. That’s always tricky with macro, though, because focus can go in and out as your body sways the tiniest bit. I’m not too concerned, though I’m mostly just having fun out there. Photography just for the love of photography. Nothing more.

Here are a few of my favorites from this summer. I shot the sunflower and the bottom bee picture last year. Enjoy. I hope they motivate you to step outside and try some new creativity with your own camera.

If you’re interested in flower photography, I recommend checking out his very good book by Harold Davis called Photographing Flowers. I’ve got this book and it’s certainly inspired me to try different approach with this kind of photography.

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Photographing In The Garden With Speedlights

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Sunny day, yet I have a broken rib. Can’t really mountain bike or go scramble around in the mountains. Getting a little stir crazy, so what to do? How about shooting photos of flowers in my yard?

Highly inspired by my friend Carl Battreall, I decided to try my own hand at shooting flash lit garden closeups.

The technique is very straightforward. You isolate your subject from the rest of the world with a white background and then light it with flash. This removes its relationship to the rest of the environment and allows you to appreciate the intimate and individual quality of the object. Subject without context. Beauty on its own.

Your background can either be a white board, or a suitably sized softbox. I used my Photoflex TritonFlash to blast the subject from the back, which created the sea of white. Depending on how close I was shooting, I used the Photoflex Octodome NXT or the 24″ Photoflex WhiteDome.

Really any softbox will do, even something like the Lumiquest Softbox III, and the Lumiquest Softbox LTP would work well to create the white background, as would a white diffuser like a Lumiquest TriGrip, or a white pillowcase. Both are For the main illumiation, I used a Nikon SB-800 inside another Octodome NXT, which I placed anywhere from 45-90 degrees off axis to the camera.

Camera was the Nikon D700, lens was 50mm f/1.8, although a dedicated macro lens would obviously let you get closer. Triggering in this configuration can be done in multiple ways, but I used a single radio remote to fire the TritonFlash, which in turn triggered the SB-800, which was set to optical slave SU-4 mode. Exposures were all about 1/160 at f/22.

Once in Lightroom, I simply tweaked the whites and highlight exposure to finish blowing out any remaining shadows and textures from the softbox that might have shown up on the background.

I have to say that I was also inspired to do this after reading the book Photographing Flowers by Harold Davis that I recently reviewed. In it, Harold discusses techniques like this one, as well as a number of other great ways to explore your garden photography creativity.

4 Techniques for Better Landscape Photos

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There you are, trekking through the backcountry with your camera, visually overwhelmed by the beauty and the majesty of the landscapes that surround you. With a scene like this in front of you, you’re confident that you’re about to make something memorable.

However, when you try to distill it all down into a single image, you come up short. The result is an uninspiring photo that fails to recreate the magnificience and power that attracted you to the scene in the first place.

Don’t worry, this happens to every photographer from time to time. Capturing the landscape in such a way that your photos have punch and drama is an endless pursuit that we all strive to do during our entire photographic lives. Here are four techniques that I use to give my landscape photos more visual power.

1. Make use of bold color.

Our eyes are drawn to bold colors, specifically those in the ‘warm’ and ‘hot’ end of the spectrum. This stems from our evolutionary need to quickly recognize things like fire, and ripe food items in the landscape, both of which demand out attention.

By including, and focusing on hot colors, like reds, yellows and orange in your scene, you inherently help draw your viewer’s eye into the frame.

This is particularly effective when those colors are placed against the more cool colors, such as blues and greens.

Also, since our eyes are naturally drawn to those warmer colors, you don’t even need very much. Just a spot of red or yellow can have a strong impact, and in fact too much yellow can overwhelm the image if it’s not balanced against the rest of the elements in your frame.

2. Strive for simplicity.

What’s going on in this mountain photo above? Basically, we have a ridge and, well… not a ridge. Pretty simple. Very simple in fact. This kind of minimalist composition can go a long way with your photography. Give your viewers as little as possible and they’ll use their brains to fill in the rest. Anytime you activate your viewer’s brain, you’ve gone a long way towards creating a memorable photograph.

Also, note the strong diagonal line. That’s also giving this image a much more dynamic feel. Imagine this photo with the ridge going straight across the frame. Exciting? Not so much.

3. Lead your viewer’s eye through the frame.

Through careful placement of your subject matter, you can lead your viewer’s eye through the frame and direct how they look at your shot. Lines such as the mountain ridge in the previous photo work well for this technique. Here I’ve used three subject elements, the stream, the boulder and the distant mountains in the background, each of which acts as both a pathway and a visual tidbit that lets the looker stop, and take a breath before moving onto the rest of the image.

The stream leads them in, the rock lets the rest and the background leads them out, or rather back in, which is usually the case. Also, the yellow tundra acts as a magnet to bring the in the door. Once they’re closer, those lines and pathways take over. Essentially, I’ve combined a couple of these techniques in order to give the image more power.

4. Get closer.

When all else fails, get closer. Go macro. Move in tight and focus on the details. Give your viewer a much more intimate look at the world and show them something that they’ve probably seen before, but might not have necessarily noticed. This is the key to all great photography.

Note: All other compositional techniques and methods of creativity still apply; just shooting close won’t get the job done.

Want more tips? Check out my eBook, Making The Image- A Conceptual Guide to Creating Stronger Photographs.

“Photographing Flowers” by Harold Davis

Dan Bailey's Adventure Photography Blog Posted on by

I’m an adventure photographer who loves to get lost exploring remote rocky mountain terrain, but I’ll admit something. I also have a domestic side. One of the things I love about is summer is gardening. I love flowers. When I’m … Continue reading →