Flower Power Unleashed!

Start With These 6 Beginner Tips for Stunning Flower & Plant Photos (No Macro Lens Necessary!)

Want to take dreamy, vibrant, eye-catching plant and flower photos? Ones that are drenched in atmosphere and steeped in your unique creative vision? Fed up with bland and boring snapshots that look just like everyone else's?

Then follow these 6 simple yet powerful tips to transform your images from average to amazing. 

 

 

Let's Get Creative!

Are you filled with inspiration and excitement when you point your camera at a beautiful flower or interesting plant, in the expectation of capturing something really breathtaking and special? Somehow, though, your photo fails to do it justice, and instead you end up with nothing more than a disappointing "snap" that looks like it could have been taken by anyone.

It's a familiar enough scenario - so, let’s fix that, shall we?

Stop Before You Snap

Photographing flowers and plants is incredibly rewarding, and the more creative we can be, the more fulfilling and joyful it becomes. But to dramatically improve your chances of bagging a winner, it's vital to get much more specific and intentional before pressing that shutter button. So it's time to lose the habit of just snapping away haphazardly before quickly moving on to the next thing.

And that’s where these tips will help.

They're the crucial building blocks designed to help overcome many of the mistakes I see a lot of beginners make - repeatedly. Start applying them to your photography with intention and purpose, and watch the quality of your work improve. Soon you'll be well on your way to saying "goodbye" to bland and boring snapshots, and "hello" to vibrant, captivating photos!

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Tip 1. Choose a lens with a longer focal length.

If you don't own a macro lens, don't worry. Lots of flower and plant portraits can be taken on other lenses, as you'll see from the examples on this page.

In simple terms, a lens’s focal length will affect the angle of view – so how much of the scene the camera can see.

Focal lengths are written as numbers on the lens.

Lower numbers (shorter focal length) give a wider angle of view, so they’ll take in much more of the scene and everything will look smaller and further away – the lens will also be shorter; these lenses are great for landscapes and architecture as they can be used to emphasise scale, mass and grandeur, but are generally not what we want for our flower photos.

Higher numbers (longer focal length) give a narrower angle of view and the lens will be longer. Things will also appear much closer to you - and that's what we're looking for.

 

The focal length or focal length range will be written on the lens.

If you have a standard kit lens, I'd suggest you keep it zoomed in to the highest number. And if it isn't that long, simply move in closer to your subject. With longer zoom lenses, you could choose anything from, say, 85 mm upwards. You’ll be able to judge the best focal length once you’ve found the flower or plant you want to photograph and framed it up in the viewfinder/monitor.

Prime lenses have one fixed focal length, so just choose a longer one (one with a higher number).

Longer lenses are great for showcasing your main subject in all its glory, without including too much else in the scene. They'll also help you blur out the background more effectively, of which more later.

 

 

Longer focal lengths allow us to get closer to the subject and eliminate distractions in the background.

 

Tip 2. Select the right aperture.

Next, we want to be able to blur whatever’s behind our subject, because this will help our flower or plant really stand out by creating separation between it and the background.

Being able to control the size of the aperture in your lens allows you to get those gorgeous blurry backgrounds. This is one of the main things that will instantly make your images look much more professional.

You’ll need to set your camera’s mode dial (that’s the dial that generally sits on top of the camera) to A - or Av if you’re a Canon user. Next, check in your manual how to change the aperture size for your particular camera – that should be fairly easy to find.

 

Set your camera's mode dial to A or Av

The best aperture size for flowers is going to be a low number, so something like f5.6 or even lower if your lens allows it. But take care not to go too low as you might not get enough of your subject in focus!

 

 

 

A longer lens and a larger aperture (lower number) will help achieve a blurrier background, as you can see in these examples.

Tip 3. Choose the right light.

This is vital! On a bright sunny day, it’s so easy to just start snapping away in your enthusiasm, ignoring the light completely. But unless you use it very carefully, bright sunshine can create havoc with your photos; if it’s coming from the wrong direction, the high contrast will cause hard, ugly shadows and bleached out highlights.

Look at these two examples of blossom photographed first in bright sunshine and then on a cloudy day.

 

High and low contrast light will change the look of your flower photos dramatically

That first image is pretty bad – you can see how much contrast there is with the bleached highlights and very dark shadows; a lot of the detail’s been lost. In the second shot, the light is much more even across the flowers, the colours are softer and more delicate and there’s lots of detail.

The easiest light to start with is soft diffused light, which you’ll get either on a cloudy day or in the shade. The reduced contrast means even light coverage over the whole subject, making it a breeze for your camera to capture all those subtle variations in tone and colour. 

And if the sun is shining, try and find a subject that’s in the shade; if that's not possible, create your own with a piece of card or something similar. Sometimes you can even use your own shadow to block out the light; just make sure you can't see where your shadow ends and the light starts - it's easily done, and you'll kick yourself afterwards!

 

Soft, even light is the perfect foil for the delicate colours of these tulips.

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Tip 4. Move in close and fill the frame.

For maximum impact, don’t be scared to really fill the frame with your subject. If the flower or plant you’re photographing has a particularly striking colour, texture or shape, don't be timid in your composition: experiment with cropping out certain elements, for a more abstract approach. Photography is about creativity and artistry, and not necessarily photographing things exactly as they appear in real life.

 

Cropping tight and eliminating part of the subject can often make for a much more powerful composition

Tip 5. Make sure there’s enough distance between the background and the subject.

This is important because even with a long focal length and a large aperture, if the background’s too close to the subject, it will still be quite sharp. So check there’s a good distance between your flower or plant, and whatever’s behind it. In this photo of blossom, the background is so far away that it’s been reduced to almost nothing, and doesn’t intrude at all.

 

 

And here, the foliage behind these leaves was a long way off, so it didn’t create any distracting shapes or lines behind them.

 

 

Tip 6. Change your angle of view - please!

This is SO important. If there’s one thing I’d urge you to do, it’s to stop taking photos from a standing position with your camera pointing downwards. If your subject is at your natural eye level, then that's fine, but if it's closer to the ground, your opportunities for creativity will be severely limited by simply shooting down onto it.

Because this is how we see the world all the time, but when it comes to photography, it can often lead to really boring pictures! There are so many more ways to create stunning shots if you simply alter your perspective.

The trouble with taking photos from a standing position when looking down on your subject is that the background will consist of what’s beneath the plant – so most probably earth, twigs, leaves, other plants etc. None of these are going to be very far away from the subject; so if you simply point your camera downwards to get your shot, they’ll be distractingly sharp and will just clutter up the background, even at a large aperture. Chances are you won’t get the best view of your subject either.

 

Shot from a standing position, the background of earth, leaves etc is very close to these crocuses and creates unnecessary clutter

However, if you lower your angle of view, you’ll immediately increase the distance between the plant and the background because of your altered perspective. In the second image below, everything’s much further away. I’ve been able to maximise the blur created by using a longer focal length and a large aperture.

If the subject's really close to the ground, and your camera’s got a fold-out monitor, these can make things a bit easier and more comfortable. (If the ground's dry, I just lie flat on my front!) But simply lowering your viewpoint even a tiny bit can sometimes be enough, especially with larger plants.

 

Lowering my angle of view means the background no longer consists of what's below the flowers, but what's actually behind them in the distance. The large aperture and longer lens focal length have thrown this completely out of focus.

So there you have it! I really hope these tips will help you on the path to improving your flower photography. Once you start practising them regularly, you’ll notice that you become much, much better at spotting good opportunities in terms of things like backgrounds, lighting and the best viewpoints.

Have a go, and come back to this page as often as you need to for reference once you’ve started.

This type of photography is, for me, absolutely the most rewarding and I hope you’ll get as much out of it as I do.

 

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Want to get much better at using your camera like a pro? Then why not join me on my next photography workshop for beginners in Guildford?

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