Five skills of taking flowers.

Facing this colorful world, how can you present the beauty of all kinds of flowers in your photos? If you want to keep the flowers beautiful, you can't do it without a little photography skills. Here are some tips for taking flowers. Let's learn them together:

Tip 1: Equipment preparation when taking flowers.

1, in the choice of camera, there are not many requirements, whether it is a mobile phone or a small DC, you can take beautiful photos. Of course, you can play better if you have a SLR camera.

2. In the choice of lens, you can use wide angle, medium distance or telephoto, because different lenses can shoot different flowers. First of all, telephoto lenses, such as 70-200mm, 100-400mm, etc., have the advantages of eliminating messy backgrounds and facilitating composition; Then talk about the macro lens, you can set the focal length to 100mm, which is generally used to take close-ups of flowers; There are also some commonly used tools, such as close-up ring or close-up tube, which can replace macro lens or telephoto lens. When you put it on your lens, you can instantly shorten the shortest focus distance and enlarge the flowers.

Flash and tripod are not necessary equipment for outdoor flower shooting, but they can be used for creation. In addition, reflectors are often used to fill the light when shooting.

A telephoto lens can not only avoid crowds, but also create a shallow depth of field.

If you have a lens with a slightly longer focal length, it will be more handy to shoot flowers. Although shooting a flower is monotonous, the effect will be different after using the foreground. Look at the picture below.

Although it is also a peach blossom, does it have a hazy dream effect? In fact, it is to use the foreground effect. Jiao Wai doesn't have to come after your topic, sometimes it can come before your topic. That kind of faint soft light effect is made in this way. The focal length of the lens used to take this photo is 135mm, and there are some tips for this promising photo shooting. Because the telephoto lens is also different from our vision, you can stare at the viewfinder and constantly adjust the composition and focus. When you are satisfied, press the shutter directly, and the success rate will be much higher.

Tip 2: Camera settings when taking flowers.

1, pay attention to control the depth of field when shooting flowers. Controlling the depth of field actually requires us to set the aperture. Large aperture is an important factor leading to the depth of the scene, and the distance between the focal length and the background will also have some influence. In order to highlight our theme, I often enlarge flowers when shooting. If the depth of field is too shallow, a small part of the flower will come out clearly, while other parts will become blurred because they are outside the depth of field. So when you shoot, you find that only the middle part of the flower is clear, so you should turn down the aperture in time.

Be careful not to have a shallow depth of field, or many parts of the flower will fall into the range of shallow depth of field.

2. Use the shutter skillfully in the breeze. Breeze is an inevitable environmental factor when we shoot flowers, especially outdoors. A little breeze can make flowers tremble, and even if we are stable, the photos may become blurred. Therefore, this requires that our shutter speed should not be too slow. First of all, we can use shutter priority or manual mode to keep the shutter speed above1100s–1/250s, and even improve ISO. Secondly, if you are using a hand-held telephoto lens, you must pay attention to the "safety shutter" in order to avoid hand shock. However, if you want to take dreamy photos, you should slow down the shutter and let the flowers tremble slightly in the breeze.

3. Pay attention to the influence of white flowers, yellow flowers and safflower on exposure. Normally, we have set the camera to semi-automatic mode with aperture priority or shutter priority. If we shoot white or yellow flowers, white and yellow will affect the metering direction of the camera until the exposure is insufficient. At this time, you can correct the EV (exposure value) according to my formula: "Light will increase when exposed to light, but decrease when exposed to darkness", and use +EV to compensate for the underexposure. In addition, there are some things to pay attention to when shooting red flowers. You can't overexpose the flowers to make them lose details, and you can't over-increase the saturation.

Beware that white flowers will misjudge the camera and lead to underexposure. At this time, increase the EV (exposure value).

The white flowers in the above picture are exposed normally under the automatic setting of the camera, but the petals are gray and the background is dim. Is this beautiful? Only the bright part should be rectified immediately, and exposure value should be added to the bright picture. Look at the picture below!

Is it much better? This photo doesn't pay much attention to composition, but does the whole photo look much better after brightening the dark parts a little? Look at the photos of those flowers in your computer. If you adjust them slightly, you may get a big picture.

4. Restore the color of flowers with white balance. Whether in the morning or at sunset, the color of light will have a great influence on the color of flowers, so we need to set a white balance to correct the color of flowers and restore the true color of flowers in photos. If you shoot flowers at sunset, the flowers will lose their warm colors without setting their own white balance.

5. When shooting flowers in sufficient light, flowers often reflect light, which makes the contrast of photos insufficient. At this time, we can remove the reflection of flowers and leaves by adding CPL polarizer to improve the contrast and saturation of photos.

Tip 3: Use of light when shooting flowers.

Light is very important for photographing flowers. Generally speaking, we should make good use of soft light, side light and backlight to avoid the fierce light at noon. Soft light often appears at sunrise or sunset. When the clouds in the sky form a natural soft box, it will soften the light, making it easier to take beautiful photos of flowers. In addition, you can also use the side light formed after sunrise and sunset to add shadows to flowers and create dramatic effects; Backlight shooting is also a common method, that is, shooting the camera at the sun to clearly show the flowers, leaves and other textures. The shooting time we need to avoid is when the sun is overhead at noon, or when the sun is very strong, and the light at this time will bring certain difficulties to shooting.

Side lighting can take dramatic photos!

Backlight photography can capture the texture and perspective of flowers, which is particularly beautiful under the blue sky.

Tip 4: Composition skills when taking flowers.

1. Adjusting your height and angle will enrich your composition. When shooting flowers, you can appropriately lower your height and adjust it to the same height as the flowers before shooting, so that you can better integrate into the world of flowers; In addition, you can stick yourself on the ground, shoot the camera up, or even put yourself in a flower, all of which can produce a special perspective effect.

Sometimes we don't have to shoot the whole flower, but we can also shoot a small part of the flower, such as stamens and petals, with a macro or telephoto lens. You can also add small insects such as bees and butterflies to the theme to decorate the flowers.

Take a close-up of flowers

3. Give up a lot of flowers, but choose one or two of the most beautiful and distinctive flowers, and then shoot with telephoto and larger aperture, so that the background becomes blurred due to the depth of the scene, avoiding the influence of messy background and making the protagonist flower more prominent.

Highlight one of the flowers with a shallow depth of field.

4. While using shallow depth of field to remove the cluttered background, we should also pay attention to the color of the background. We can try to choose a background with high contrast color, such as looking for red flowers on a green background, which is more obvious and prominent than flowers!

5. In addition to the most basic golden section, filling composition, diagonal and S-shaped composition, you can also try "frame diagram". The specific operation is to lock the target first, find out the flowers to shoot, and then use the front stem and leaf as a "frame" to shoot in the gap. This effect not only makes readers naturally focus on flowers, but also adds a lot of mystery.

6, minimalism, when the weather is fine, you can choose to leave blank to attract the viewer's reverie.

Do you think a messy bouquet can't be left blank? Make too much noise. Another way is to shoot a bouquet as tall as a peach blossom, which we strongly advocate. When the weather is fine, you can also shoot like this.

Look at the photo above, most of the peach blossoms are in a rage. At this time, raising the plane seat can also achieve good results. Proper blank space also increases people's imagination, but this method is only suitable for sunny days. If the sky is pale on a cloudy day, the effect may be greatly reduced.

7, do not take the small fresh route, for players with heavy taste, you can use black and white contrast, especially colored flowers.

Look at the red peach blossoms below:

Does it look very focused! This kind of photo is taken in a different way from the previous one. First of all, I suggest that you adjust the camera's metering mode to "spot metering" and aim at the highlights of the flowers. At this time, the way of "better than less" will be reversed, and the exposure compensation adjustment is too high to achieve this effect. Also pay attention to darkening the shadows later. If you use PS post, here is a trick. We can add black to the "black" part of "optional colors" or darken the background.

Tip 5: Creative photography when taking flowers.

1. Take special photos with double exposure. If you have mastered all the above skills and feel that there is not much new idea, you can try the "double exposure" function in the camera, that is, change the focal length and shape, or deliberately lose focus and shoot the same flower many times. If you try more, you will find that you can get more interesting works.

"Double exposure" of pink and white flowers.

2. Under proper light (such as side light and backlight), only a small part of the flower is photographed by telephoto or macro lens, so the photos taken are often more artistic and contain some abstract meanings.

Shooting a small amount of flowers can produce an abstract effect!

Try shooting with a shallow depth of field and a large close-up!

After all the shooting, we still return to simplicity. In fact, sometimes mastering the basic knowledge of photography and the essentials of composition can achieve the effect you want. After you have learned the above skills, you must make sure that there are no winning tricks.

The above picture can be said to be a combination of these moves instead of following the strokes above. Taking flowers is actually a great exercise in photography. It is not easy to photograph the beauty of plants in the chaos. If you think the method introduced in this article is useful, please practice it often. I believe your photography skills will get better and better.