Sometimes I show you something on the “Streets of Nuremberg” that is outside the usual scope of my posts about street- and travel photography. During May natures just pops (pardon the pun 😉 ). Lush green and bright colors everywhere. But often the weather is still inconsistent, with many cloudy days. These conditions are actually perfect for some flower photography using a zoom lens. For more photos and some how-to continue after the jump…
Take your camera and a zoom lens and head out to your next best field, lawn or woodland area where you find some high grass with flowers. Extend your lens to the far end of its zoom range, get down low and focus on a flower (or a group of flowers) a bit away. It absolutely doesn’t hurt if there are weeds in-between your lens and the object your focus on, this helps to create this dreamy and slightly blurred effect. Open the aperture to its widest setting (in case of my zoom lens this was f/5,6 at the far end of its range). Depending on the movement of the flowers / weeds set your shutter speed to about 1/200 as a starting point, the ISO results from those settings, but due to the open f-stop it should be in a range that modern cameras can handle easily.
Then shoot away, experiment with the settings. Try portrait and landscape format, zoom in tight or go a bit wider. Experiment!
On a cloudy day the sky acts like a giant soft box, smoothing out an even, pleasing light and eliminating harsh contrast which you don’t want in these kind of photographs.
Hope you liked this short excursion into flower photography. And doesn’t this post fit perfectly with the celebration of Mothers Day this coming Sunday? Give your Mom a nicely framed flower picture 😉
Check out my Learning Center, here you can find all my tips and inspirations around photography in an easy to navigate overview! Enjoy!
Have a great Friday!
Marcus
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