1 Brilliant bluebells

Capture the richness of forest flora in spring

Spring is the perfect time to photograph a forest floor richly carpeted with bluebells. It makes a wonderfully evocative image that you will treasure all year round.

Kilian Schönberger took this striking shot in the famous Hallerbos Forest, near Brussels in Belgium. “I took it around an hour after sunrise, as the fog was suddenly crouching between the trees,” he explains. “There was no fog at sunrise, but luckily I stayed long enough to capture this fine forest mood.”

You can’t blame Kilian for being tempted to call it a day: he’d driven 220km overnight from Cologne in Germany to get to this spot, setting off shortly after midnight. “It’s possibly the best spot for bluebell photography on the continent,” he says. “I’d never been there before, so I didn’t knew what the conditions would be like. It was still dark when I started exploring the forest and I looked for spots that could provide an interesting composition. A lot of light was reaching the forest floor in the areas covered by the bluebells, so it required careful exposure settings.” www.kilianschoenberger.de

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* As Kilian notes, you need to be in the right place at the right time to get good spring flower shots. “It’s not easy to schedule the exact date several weeks in advance, so I normally start my trip spontaneously, when I think the conditions could be right.” * Kilian set a slow shutter speed of 1/2 sec, a narrow aperture of f/13 for plenty of depth of field, and an ISO of 200 to minimise noise. The lens was a Canon 70–200mm f/4.0 L, supported by a Manfrotto 190XPROB tripod. * Kilian didn’t just rely on picturesque bluebells to make the image: note how the path leads in the eye. Good composition is fundamental to good landscape photography. * It can be tricky to get the right white balance in misty early-morning conditions, so always shoot in raw so you can tweak it afterwards.