Get set for the garden

Camera skills for capturing fantastic floral pictures

Early summer is one of the best times to try some close-up photography. After bursting out in spring, flowers and leaves are in peak shape in gardens and parks – although you need to be quick to catch them at their best.

Getting your camera set up for this is straightforward. You should shoot in Raw, so you have the freedom to fine-tune aspects of the image later. Being able to adjust the hue, saturation and lightness of individual colours is useful with flower photography, as you can make foliage appear more blue-green or yellowgreen, for example, or give colourful petals a saturation push without affecting the rest of the image.

One problem you face this time of year is that the light can be quite harsh, leaving you with hotspots and hard shadows. To avoid this, try to take pictures towards the start and end of the day, when the light is softer. Shooting in Raw then gives you more room to balance the exposure when you process your files, such as opening up shadows to reveal more detail and reducing the heat in the highlights.

You won’t be able to pull back bright areas that have completely burnt out, though, and brightening the dark parts increases noise in those areas, so it pays to get the exposure as good as possible in-camera. Use the RGB histogram as a guide to getting it right. Set an exposure that captures detail in the bright areas of the picture, then use a reflector to bounce light into the shadows. You can also use a remote Speedlite to do this, but make sure the exposure for the bright areas is no faster than the camera’s flash sync speed (which is typically 1/200 sec), or use the high-speed sync option, if available.