Tag:creative
Its Spring! That means flower photography. The bees are buzzing; flowers are blooming. Cloudy winter skies are giving way to blue skies and sunshine. And lockdown or not – photographing flowers is something you can do economically from the comfort of your own home, and when it’s wet or breezy, you can still photograph inside – but give the impression they were taken outdoors. Try the following techniques for flower photography to get you started.
Gathering Your Subjects
A show-worthy garden is not required to photograph flowers. Look to your own or your neighbour’s garden. Pop into your local nursery and photograph their blooms (if you aren’t in lockdown). Take the camera on your walk and photograph the blossoms or wattle. Keep a pr of scissors in your pocket, and if you want to take a cutting home, you can snip a piece off from the blossom or wattle trees on the nature strips or parks as you go by. If you have no garden, a bunch of mixed flowers from the supermarket is a great place to start. Look for daises, lilies, daffodils, Gerbera, and sweet williams.
Outdoors
Consider wind when deciding what, when and where to photograph. A tripod is highly recommended using a macro lens, but this won’t help if it’s breezy and the flowers move like crazy. If your flowers won’t hold still – cut them and take them to a sheltered spot or indoors. Early morning or late afternoon will give you the best light and avoid the harsh shadows of the middle of the day when it’s sunny. Indoors you have more control over lighting.
Light
Natural light or flash? I prefer non-flash – so that the light is softer, and I prefer to compensate with a longer shutter speed on a tripod. If you use a flash (or a torch), direct the light to the background, not the flower, to reduce your shadows on the flower. Indoors, filtered side light from a southwest-facing window works a treat in either early morning or late afternoon. Lacey curtains will create exciting patterns while sheers will diffuse the light. A small reflector allows you to bounce light back to the darkest side. Don’t have one? An economical alternative is to cover a piece of cardboard with aluminium foil.
Composition
Fill the frame? Patterns, textures? Also, consider the plane of focus. For example, if you are photographing down into a flower with a deep centre, such as a lily or a rose, the stamens will focus while the side walls are out of focus.
Depth of Field
Do you want all the flowers in focus or just a part of it? If you use a macro, you will only get a narrow slice in focus regardless of your aperture; if you want more of the flowers in focus when shooting with a macro, consider focus stacking. With a zoom lens, more or all of the flowers will be in focus if using an F-stop or F7 or more. The silkiness of the background bokeh will depend on the lens utilised – and how far away from the flower the background is.
Inside or out?
With spring being windy – and lockdown limiting movement options – this is my preferred go-to at the moment. For this post, I picked up a bunch of flowers from the supermarket, gathered my tools and set them up near a window. I used a macro and my walkaround lens for the shots, and focus stacked the macro shots. With the camera on a tripod, I wasn’t concerned about shutter speed – I set the ISO to 200, the F stop to between 5.0 and 7 depending on which lens was on the camera, and I just adjusted the shutter until the exposure was correct.
Handy Tools To Have for indoor shoots.
- Printed backgrounds – I made mine in photoshop and blurred them to give me a silky DOF, but you can also use wrapping paper, placemats etc. You can also place flowers behind your main subject as a background. To start you off with printed backgrounds, there are four free ones to download at the end of this post. The ones I used were printed on A4 180gsm matt photo paper – there is no need for a large sheet when photographing a single flower.
- Bulldog clips to hold your backgrounds
- Pegs and Memo holders to hold a single flower or backdrop. slide a piece cut from a drinking straw or heat tube over the teeth, so they don’t crush the flower stem
- a specimen holder – I made my own with a mini tripod, alligator clip, and heat shrink plastic tube (thanx for the tip Stewart Wood)
- a glass (no water) to hold a single flower
- Vase or water to hold your flowers and keep them from wilting while working
Setup and my Final Shots
Each split screen below shows the setup – and the finished shot. There is no hard and fast rule I follow… most of the time, the backgrounds do stand up ok.. sometimes, I have to handhold. I haven’t glued them to more robust cardboard as the photo paper is double-sided, so I printed the background on each side… it’s not a huge problem to get them to stand up. I think a small easel might do the trick for the odd one that won’t play nice 😉
Setup One
This was the most straightforward setup of all. First, place your bloom in a glass to support it upright (no water needed). Next, choose your background, put it behind the image, and shoot. Support your printed background with a couple of large bulldog clips as stands; if using wrapping paper, try blue tac to attach it to the wall behind your flower. Then zoom in on the part of the flower you want to shoot… or use the macro.
Setup Two
For this shot, I held the Gerbera upright using two clothes pegs. My greenery behind was held with memo and bulldog clips, and my little specimen stand and another bulldog clip held the backdrop in place.
Setup Three
Bit of a lazy effort with setup Three. I used the Gerbera again – this time in the glass with the pegs holding it straight up in the middle of the glass. This background didn’t want to stand up, so I handheld it and took the shot.
Setup Four
I chose another Gerbera with setup number four and again situated it in the glass, held in place with pegs. However, I had to raise the glass a bit for this one with a book to get the part of the background I wanted in the right place. So again, I lowered the tripod, and shot with the macro, shot level with and side onto the flower.
I hope you enjoyed the Techniques for Flower Photography – at the bottom of the post are your free backgrounds.
Click the button below to download your four free backgrounds. It’s a zip file, so you will need WinRar or Winzip to unzip it. Both programs are free to download
Should landscape photographers manipulate images? (take vs make an image) Manipulating an image, is it acceptable? I would have to say, straight off the bat, that I am firmly in the camp of making the image. While I hope for a great sky or light when I shoot, I am not against swapping in a new sky or adding light to create a better image. When the circumstances or conditions have given me lemons, I make lemonade.
Straight from the camera?
I also realise that some of you are throwing up your hands in horror and reminding me that this is totally unacceptable when entering competitions. However, I don’t enter competitions, and should I enter one, I wouldn’t use an image that has been heavily manipulated. Apart from that, I love manipulating an Image. Painters don’t necessarily paint what they see. They take artistic license – and people accept that as normal. With photographers, though, there is a large school of thought that the image should be as it was photographed, without adding or removing elements. So I tend to regard myself as someone who paints with a camera. I guess I could call myself a creative or ‘fine art photographer’ as it seems that you can change elements in fine art.
This school of thought seems to apply almost exclusively to landscape photography, and to a lesser degree, portraits. For an image that is obviously a composite or more in the digital manipulation section, adding or removing elements is not only acceptable but part of the process.
Changing a sky
Back in January, back when the world was still chugging along, oblivious to the oncoming pandemic and associated lockdowns, I enjoyed a quick overnight trip down to Portland where we stayed at the Cape Nelson Lighthouse. Coming back, we stopped off at a lavender farm. The sky was a bland white; the lavender wasn’t a lovely purple without sunshine. Had we been there in perfect conditions – I could have gotten the shot I wanted. However, at home, with Photoshop and Luminar, I edited and created the image that I could have gotten had the conditions been right… as a painter could without criticism.
Making the image doesn’t mean every image I take is manipulated, but I am not against having it in my bag of tricks. I also believe that if an image does have a swapped in the sky, it’s a bit dishonest to pretend it’s not. But, at the end of the day, my images are for me. I don’t sell them (no one wants them, LOL). I don’t enter competitions. They are just for my enjoyment, so I am not cheating or fooling anyone.
With the new Luminar Ai due out before the end of the year, this topic will not go away. Full disclosure, I have already pre-ordered my copy. What are your thoughts? Do you take or make an image?
Toms amazing adventures continued as he cycled along a backroad towards St George. A patrol car emerged out of the dust plume behind him, pulled alongside, and asked for his destination. “I’m going to St George, brother,” said Tom. “Do you have any ID on you?” officer Peter Pickle asked, “no suh”, Tom said, “I identify as aboriginal, my dad passed back in March, and we don’t use the name of someone who has died. I am waiting on my new name change documents, but I don’t have them yet” Officer Pickle then asked, “what’s your address and date of birth? “Well, brother”, Tom replied, “I was born in 1979, but I don’t know what day or month. I live at the Cherbourg settlement, but I’ve been walkabout since my dad died, and now I am heading back to Cherbourg.”
Long Arm Of The Law
Officer Peter Pickle and Officer Randal Relish looked at each other in confusion. Officer Relish then asked, “do you have anything on you to show you are a Queensland resident?” Tom said, “would a letter from an elder in my mob do?” reaching into the back of his pants, Tom produced a warm, crumpled, beer, and wine-soaked letter with ketchup stains splashed over it that Beryl had knocked up in her kitchen for him. He leaned over and made to hand it through to the window towards them. Both officers looked horrified at what Tom was handing them. He brusquely said, “on your way,” as they quickly zapped the windows up and drove off in a cloud of dust.
Grinning broadly, Tom waited till they vanished in the distance and then rode into St George. While there, he sold his bike at Cash Converters before heading to the backpacker hostel on foot. Once at the hotel, he put his name on the board for a lift to Roma before joining a group of Swedish tourists in the garden.
Charters Towers
Tom picked up a lift with two french girls heading to Charters Towers and rode with them as far as Roma. In Roma, he started to make his way to the self-storage unit that held the last items he had bought. He passed a vintage car display and stopped to look, several times getting in the way of the photographers. He knew this because they kept asking him to move out of their shot.
Walking around looking at the cars, he noticed a blue police phone box in the distance and had a chuckle to himself, thinking Queenslanders really are backward if the police still use those old blue phone boxes.
Travels with the Doctor
Tom wandered around the car festival and walked past the blue phone box – just as an odd-looking chap with bushy eyebrows popped out the door. Introducing himself as John Smith, he began chatting to Tom and invited him inside. After a brief explanation, and once Tom got over it was bigger on the inside, John, who called himself The Doctor, offered him a chance to travel with him. Always up for an adventure, Tom jumped at the chance. They left Roma on Sept 28th, 2020, at 4 pm. Tom and John travelled together for two years, with Tom having many more amazing adventures before dropping him back in Roma at 4.04 pm on Sept 28th, 2025. By now, COVID had all but disappeared save for the odd outbreak among the conspiracy theorists who refused to be vaccinated.
Tom picked up his car and caravan from the self-storage (Bill, who had access to Toms bank, had kept the account up the date while he was travelling with John) and headed off up the road towards Airlie Beach, whereby now, Bill and Beryl had retired. At Airlie Beach, Tom and Bill bought a bar and backpacker hostel. Tom became a popular figure around town, entertaining all with his ‘tall tales of his amazing adventures. Sitting on his porch one day, he mused, “maybe I should write a book. I’ll call it Toms Amazing Adventures”.
The End
Due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, eBooks are proving popular. Photographers across the world have had their income severely curtailed. Tours are cancelled, portrait shoots put on hold. Wedding photographers have no weddings to shoot, even newborn photography has taken a hit with no one allowed into your home. Consequently, this has led to many photographers putting out eBooks to help boost their income. And sitting at home in front of your computer – looking to learn while you are stuck in isolation, it’s tempting to buy them. But are they worth your money? With a couple of reservations. Yes.
Over the course of this pandemic and isolation, I have bought a few eBooks, looking to upskill myself, ready for when I can venture out again. I found, overall, most were good to great. Informative, lots of tips and secrets divulged. Easy to checkout and download, tick, tick. And conversely, one, quite disappointing with basic content that I could pick up with just as easily with an internet search.
Price
Overall, the price of eBooks is something that really bugs me. Yes, the author has a lot of time putting it together. But after it’s ready, that’s it. Upload it, advertise it, sit back and wait for sales. No more work is required, and it keeps (hopefully) bringing in money month after month for years, with no more work required. Money for jam. So why are they priced equal to or dearer than print books when they don’t have the overheads? There are no printing or distribution costs. No commission or markup to retailers. Yet the price doesn’t reflect this.
Buyer beware
I read voraciously on my iPad. Mostly fiction, with some photography related ebooks. The fiction books are always $10 to $20 cheaper than ‘textbooks’, so not a big investment. However, textbooks are usually a lot dearer. So I try to be selective with them. A boring or badly written fiction book at $15 or less is easier to stomach than a photography ebook where I learned nothing but paid $35 – $40. And I really wished for a money-back guarantee with the last one I bought. Some do give it – some don’t.
Reviews
Be aware; these are my opinions only. You may feel completely different about the books. I also purchased all these books – none are paid reviews.
Landscape Photography: On Location
by Thomas Heaton
$6.58 on Amazon
One of my favourite eBooks. I have been following Thomas via his YouTube channel for ages, so I jumped at the book when I found it.
It contains loads of useful, well explained technical information for all skill levels. While it’s not a ‘how-to’ manual, it contains many tips, pointers, and inspiration. And for the price, you can’t go wrong.
Photographing Fabulous Flowers
By Leanne Cleaveley
$19 from Photzy
This book is well written, filled to the brim with loads of helpful tips and hints on getting the perfect shot. Leanne covers everything from settings to composition to editing and printing. The book also comes with a bonus checklist plus a flower waterdrop tutorial. If you’re not satisfied, it’s also backed by a 365-day money-back guarantee. No money-back is needed on this one. If you are into flower photography, this one is definitely for you.
For the Love of Food
By Julie Powell
$25 from Julie Powell Photography
This is a great little eBook.
Seventeen pages covering composition, lighting, hints, and tips on backgrounds and props.
If you are getting into food photography and looking for where to start, you will be on the right path.
No money-back guarantee (not that I want one), but for the price, definitely value for money.
Captiviting Color
by Mitchell Kanashkevich
$19 from Digital Photography School
This was one of the first eBooks I purchased on photography, and it made a huge difference to how I “see” images. It aims to teach you how to understand and use colour. This, in turn, influences your viewer’s attention to the image and use colour and subjects for maximum impact.
Includes six practical exercises to help you implement what you have learned. Comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee.
The Creative Photography Cookbook
by Dina Belenko
$39 Available from Expert Photography
In a word. Awesome. This book has to be the bee’s knees for creative food photography. Dina Belenko is the queen of ‘conceptual still like photography’ with 44k followers on Instagram.
Her book covers composition, props, setups, techniques. 31 projects with loads of pictures, giving you step-by-step directions from props to setup to editing on creating your own amazing images.
Includes bonus ‘recipe’ sheets. One of the more expensive books, but it’s 374 pages big! It also comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee.
Miniature Worlds
by David Gilliver
£20 from Davids website
I had to hit one turkey sooner or later on the law of averages.
David is a fabulous photographer from Glasgow, Scotland, renowned for light painting and miniatures. He has been featured in many newspapers for his small world figures and has over 2.5k followers on Instagram. The book is roughly the same price as Dina Belenko’s but 1/6th size.
However, his book of ’52 pages’ sounded great. He said his book “is packed full of advice and detailed information on camera gear & settings. Additionally it included information on where to source the figurines and props. He claimed to have “not held anything back and have shared everything that I have learned over the past 20+ years”.
I agonised over this book for a week or more. I really wanted it. But there was no money-back guarantee. In the end, because I had never asked for my money back before, I bit the bullet and bought it. And so wished I had saved myself the $37 Au. We didn’t get information on how to do these figures till page 13. The first 12 pages are fluff. The next seven pages contain images and descriptions. Nothing you couldn’t work out yourself by looking at them on his Instagram page.
The following pages cover camera settings and props, then more images and tip gems such as “check battery is charged, and sd card is in camera”. He may have held nothing back, but what he gave was nothing I hadn’t already learned by google searching others. In fact, I learned more from a free tutorial on the Adobe Create page.
Moral to the story
Above all, don’t buy if they don’t offer a money-back guarantee. Of all the books I have bought, those with the guarantee were worth it, and I was a satisfied customer. I guess I know why David’s book didn’t come with one.
1. Splash Photography
Splash photography is an easy one. Luckily, I am extremely suited to digital photography. The amount of film that would be wasted on this doesn’t bear thinking about – but with digital, it doesn’t matter if you dump 20 shots to get one keeper. For the image above, I placed a teaspoon on a mirror – poured yellow food colouring on the mirror and put red food colouring in the teaspoon. My camera was set up on a tripod and in high-speed continuous mode. I had more red food colouring in an eye dropper, and at the same time, as I squeezed off a drop, I fired off the shutter using a remote. Flinging fruit and vegetables into water is also a hugely fun project (and, again, hit and miss). There is very little science to it, setup, throw and shoot. Out of every burst, you will prob get one or two keepers.Fish Tank = splash
For water splash photography, set up a fish tank against a non-reflective background (I prefer black). Fill the tank to about 3/4 full. Hard fruits such as lemons, limes, pomegranate, persimmon, apples, kiwi fruit and capsicums work the best. Berries are too light and soft – except for strawberries – you can use them but use them last as they will make the water murky as they get soggy. The full tutorial is HERE
Lighting
You do need a flash for splash to freeze the motion – Set your ISO to 200, F stop 11.0 and have a shutter speed of 1/125. You also need your camera on high-speed continuous. Wipe the outside of the glass between throws to save you from having to tidy it up in post. You will also need to tidy up the image using a clone tool, as you will get lots of unwanted drips and drops. It’s also an image that will look totally underwhelming until it’s edited. In the above image, you can see before – straight out of the camera, and after, with editing. I cloned out the distractions, bumped up the colour, deepened the blacks and applied a sharpen.2. Crystal Balls
3. Oil and Water
Oil and water is one of the easiest to do at home. Mainly because you probably have everything you already need there. Glass dish, oil, water. Good to go. I did a full tutorial on oil and water HERE.
4. Little Planets
Little planets are images made from your panoramic images. Using Photoshop, you manipulate the image to look like a little planet. It’s easy and loads of fun. The tutorial for Little Planets is HERE
5. Frozen Flowers
6. International Camera Movement
7. Multiplicity
