Photographing Flowers
Taking pictures of flowers takes a lot of patience. Since depth of field will be reduced to fractions of an inch if you use close-up attachments, you will have to think very carefully about what part of the flower you want to be in focus. Often, only an edge will be sharp, even with your lens stopped down to its smallest aperture. This means exposures for a shot like this are typically very slow, anywhere from 1/30th of a second to several seconds.With long exposures, wind becomes a problem. Any movement will result in a blurred image. Some nature photographers carry sticks and plastic ties to hold the stem steady. Others use blinds to block the wind. And the really dedicated just wait for the wind to stop, or they come back another day.
Early morning is a good time to shoot flowers. The wind often dies down and the light will be at its best. Avoid shooting flowers in direct, harsh sunlight. You will be disappointed in the results. Although flowers look good to our eyes in bright light, on film, there's just too much contrast and the colors burn out. An overcast day will will produce flowers with lovely, saturated colors.
It's also important to photograph flowers at their peak. It's a real disappointment when you loup your prize-winning flower shot on the light box and find the leaves have been chewed up by insects or a petal is missing or starting to turn brown. In the excitment of shooting we may not notice these imperfections, but they will be painfully evident when you get your prints or slides back.
Close-up photography is a complex, highly technical subject, usually referring to photographs that are lifesize or larger (1:1, or 1x or larger). But for our purposes, we just want to isolate details in our scenic shots and zoom in on them. Mostly we will be taking portraits of flowers and other details at one-fourth or one-half lifesize (1/4x, 1/2x), which you can do with most modern zooms.
To make the photograph of a peach blossom above, I used a 200mm telephoto lens. I placed a 1.4X teleconverter between the lens and camera body and added a Nikon 3T close-up attachment to the lens.
Peach blossom © 1994 Ed Morris
Click here for more about close-up techniques.