Home garden photos

There’s a bounty of great images waiting in your back garden

07 Fabulous florals

If you’re lucky enough to have a garden you may have some flowers that can make brilliant subjects – or buy a bunch during your next grocery shop. You can shoot outside, or inside with window light, or try some desk lamps to inject extra lighting. Just be sure to have a clean backdrop – we used a light blue wall for the tulip shots – to make the flowers stand out. You can get decent results with the long end of a kit lens, like 55mm, but a macro lens will let you focus even closer. Shoot in Av mode and use a wide aperture around f/4 or f/2.8 for shallow DOF. Spend time working out the most creative compositions.

08 Make tiny bugs look big!

You don’t have to go on an African safari trip to get portfolio-worthy wildlife pictures, you’d be surprised at how much you can shoot in your garden. Tiny critters like ladybirds, snails and caterpillars all make fantastic subjects and you can get close to them with the long end of a kit lens, or a macro optic. It’s worth experimenting with wide-angle macro lenses too if you get the opportunity, as these grant you a wider perspective for extra context. If you’re feeling really creative you could even add in a little off-camera flash to keep the shots nice and bright.

09 Photograph birds

Set up feeding stations that you can easily shoot from a window in your house so you can shoot out of sight. Use a long lens, such a 100-400mm, to zoom in and pre-focus on a branch near the feeder, where the birds will land. Use Aperture Priority mode with your widest aperture, such as f/5.6 or f/2.8, and adjust the ISO up to 400 or 800 until you get a really fast shutter speed of around 1/1000 sec to freeze the fast-moving birds for sharp shots.

10 Get super close to leaves

Looking for a DIY project that you can do by yourself, or with the kids to keep them busy? Here you’ll create your own lightbox to backlight leaves from the garden and reveal their extraordinary amount of detail and colour. You just need an old cereal box, some tape and tracing paper, as well as some string lights to put inside.