How to Put the Boom Into Bloom With Fantastic Flower Photos!

For beginners, photography is a great hobby. The opportunity to go out and about, taking everything from sweeping landscapes, to stunning shots of speeding racing cars. On vacation, exploring new countries, or just having fun at the beach. However, sometimes it's nice to slow the pace down - and the sheer pleasure of capturing a single flower, or a vast field of flowers, should not be ignored.

So how can you ensure that the flowers you see in the wild look just as lovely when you view them back on your monitor, or better still, print and frame them? Well, it's not just a matter of simply walking past some flowers and snapping your shutter - the way you take flower photos is key to success.

There's no doubt that capturing a flower in full bloom is the ideal. So timing is everything - you will need to know when they are going to look at their best for you - flowers like to pose too!

A key element to any photograph is the quality of the lighting. To best capture your flowers, a bright sunny day is preferred. It's very difficult to make flowers look truly amazing in drab, overcast conditions. Not by coincidence, they appear much more at ease in sunshine.

Successful flower pictures can be taken with most modern digital cameras, but if you can use one that enables you to control aperture and depth of field, this would be an advantage. You could check out one of my previous beginner's photography articles on controlling aperture and shutter settings to improve your photos.

It's usually best to "dress down" for your flower assignment. At least, wear jeans - as invariably you will have to kneel, or even lie, down in order to get up close and personal with your chosen blooms.

So once you are there, try and be creative. Flowers can be pictured in a host of many ways - but just enjoy yourself and experiment. Don't forget your basic rules of composition, so include a point of interest the viewer can focus on. For example, in a vast field of flowers, you could try isolating one single flower, keeping this in focus and blurring the remainder, controlling depth of field by altering the aperture settings. Consider changing the colour of this one flower later on, in Photoshop. Or you could make the background monochrome.

You could even try getting right amongst the flowers, so you can see the world from their perspective. Why not picture the petals close up, with the camera pointing up slightly in order to catch the bright blue sky. Experimenting with pictures of flowers can be a fun aspect of beginner's photography, and as you get more experienced at it, you may find that your images become a more serious study into the world of flowers.

Source : Ezinearticles