Shoot a flower portrait
A simple starter project to shoot individual specimens with success
Before you start photographing busy floral arrangements, you might want to practise your shooting skills and approach with single blooms. In this tutorial, we’ll demonstrate how to take striking flower portraits, using just one artificial version of a specimen that we were able to buy from a local florist. As the focus is on an individual flower, for this shoot it’s best to choose one that has a clear structure, such as a lily or gerbera daisy.
You needn’t use any expensive equipment, here – as many of the pros have already pointed out, natural light is often best. With that in mind, we made use of window light and a reflector. A sheet of black card was
1 SET THE TABLE Position your chosen background (card or fabric) perpendicular to a large window or glass door. Place the flower in front of this. If needed, set up a white reflector opposite the window to bounce light into the shadows.
2 GET THE GEAR Mount your camera on a tripod, set it to face the flower, and rotate it to portrait orientation. Set the tripod and lens at roughly the same height as the flower. We also attached a zoom lens to recompose more easily.
3 CAMERA SETTINGS You might want to use a remote control to fire your camera in order to avoid motion blur. If so, set the camera for this. Select aperture priority mode, and then stop the lens down to around f8, with the ISO set at 100.
4 SHARP SHOTS Switch to Live View mode and frame up your composition, zooming into the flower. Here, you’ve got time to adjust the focus precisely and manually by turning the lens barrel. Start off by taking a few test shots.
5 REVIEW IN-CAMERA In playback mode, zoom into images to check the focus point is correct. Look at the histogram to check the exposure and make sure you haven’t clipped any highlights; dark backgrounds can fool the camera meter into overexposing the flower. positioned behind our subject to declutter the background and focus the eye on the flower, but you could experiment with different colours to suit the tones of your subject. When picking your colour, just be mindful of whether you might want to convert the image to black and white at a later stage.
Make sure your camera is mounted on a tripod, both to keep it sturdy and to enable you to refine your composition more subtly. As always, think about what angle will be most interesting, and how close to crop in the frame. Once you’ve shot a few images that you’re happy with, you can then start to edit them following the tutorial on page 72.
6 EXPERIMENT WITH LIGHTING At this point you could rotate the current setup and try a different position, turning slightly towards or away from the window. Try using a reflector to fill the shadows of the flower. Shooting without a reflector will produce a more contrasted image.
7 START SHOOTING When you’re happy with the composition and camera settings, it’s now time to capture the final image. If you’re shooting on a DSLR camera, lock up the camera mirror. Fire off frames using a cable release or a remote control for maximum sharpness.
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TRY BLACK AND WHITE With your camera set to shoot RAW, select monochrome shooting mode. This way, when you take shots, you’ll be able to see a black and white image on the preview screen, but you’ll also still have a full-colour RAW file for you to convert later.