Flowers (1)

You may have noticed, I love to take nature photos! You saw butterflies, birds, and now I start a new series, dedicated to flowers! 

Even when I didn't have my macro attachement, most cameras allow macro mode to shoot these subjects. My current camera allows me to get as close as 1 CM in super-macro mode, whilst macro mode allows 10CM, which was the same for my previous camera. 


To shoot flowers, you need to take into account several things, depending on the conditions :

In very sunny conditions, you need to either close your iris by raising the F-stop and/or use a faster shutter speed (decrease the time of exposure to fractions of a second).

In overcast, you'll need on the contrary to lengthen your exposure time and open the iris to let as much as light as possible. 

In windy conditions, the flower may sway or even move so much that you won't be able to keep your focus. A tripod helps, but sometimes you just need to be patient and let the wind stop, or while you shoot, hold the stem with your hand, gently as you don't want to break it.

For the smallest flowers, a tripod, macro attachement and a camera capable of zooming onto the subject/ or a macro lens in case of DSLR are primordial, as normal focusing distance of 5-10 CM won't always be enough to even see the flower clearly, I've had that happen more than once on tiny flowers. 

I like to change my angles and take multiple shots, with different framing and settings, to make sure some of my photos come out okay. 

On occasion, insects may rest or walk on the flower. They can make your task a bit harder if they flutter too much, and they can add to the photo, or distract. If you dislike them there, wait for them to go, or move to a different subject. 

In some conditions, I hadn't seen other distracting aspects : broken petals, dust, or in nicer cases, pollen, water droplets. 

If you wish to identify, am sure that there are a lot of websites and there are quite a few books to help you on this task. I used to research this but I'm so behind that I won't bother to display names for the next photos.

I edited all these slightly with GIMP 2.8 and sometimes a tad bit more with windows 10's photo viewer, but not much at all. In general, I edit levels for  optimal white balance, contrast, brightness, color lightness and/or hue/saturation.