Taking Portraits of flowers
This is my first foray into sharing what I know about cameras and photography. I cannot pretend to be an expert, and there is still much I don’t know. However, I do know what I do know, which is why my photographs have a very consistent style.
The first thing to know is to know is that photography is working with a medium that you take so much for granted that you can’t even see it any more. Light. I am talking about natural light. Under no circumstances should you photograph anything with your electric lights switched on. I’ll wait here whilst you go and switch them all off.
The second thing to know is that it isn’t about more light good, less light bad. It is about where the light comes from more than anything else, and how it comes. Remember:
If you are a bride or groom, you pray for sunshine on your wedding day.
If you are a wedding photographer, you pray for clouds.
The third thing to know is that no good photo that you see on the internet and that has been taken by someone over the age of 35 will have undergone some form of editing or filtering. So as not to overwhelm, I am doing a second post on editing. If you apply all the tips in this blog post (and you didn’t know them already), your images will be 50% better, but you’ll need some good processing to get them to 100%. I used to absolutely despair that my pictures just looked so rubbish (i.e. flat, boring, amateurish), I am going to tell you all the insider secrets that make other people’s look fab. But back to light…
Learn how to see light
Before we even pick up a camera (I will be interchanging between a camera and a phone for this), I want you to find yourself an egg. I bought white ones especially for this. Vegans can use a ping pong ball; the texture is slightly different but the principles are the same.
If you have an egg cup, all the better. You’ll want to put the egg down, step back and look at it. Much easier if you have a way of keeping it upright.
Just to get in the habit of thinking about it, the photo of the egg was taken on an iPhone 12 Pro, portrait mode, cropped in VSCO to 2:3 to ensure that the tip of the egg is centred and the egg cup fills the bottom third of the frame, filter J6 applied, temperature increased slightly.
principle 1:Side light = texture
Ever caught sight of yourself on your camera phone and recoiled at how old you look and how many double chins you have…? Blame the side light (and the angle, but more on that later). This is texture you didn’t want.
Ever seen someone in a meeting first thing on a Monday morning and they look perky and flawless? I bet my bottom dollar they went on amazon and bought themselves a ring light which means they are flooding the front of their face with light, and it just erases all those wrinkles. Flowers on the other hand, are all about texture. About shape and form. You want to highlight all those light catching tips and shadows. So here’s your general rule:
Faces = front light.
Flowers = side light.
Of course, there are exceptions to this. If you are going for a craggy sort of portrait, or you are photographing a supermodel and you want to emphasis incredible cheekbones, start messing around with side light, but generally, this rule holds. The other exception? Dogs.
Now let’s have a look at how side, front and back light looks on our egg.
A completely behind the scenes, how is it done, shot of my set up. It is all about the side light. Even on the table, which seems so far away from the window to feel like it should make no odds, I make sure that the light comes from the side. But the absolute prime place is close to, but not right next to, the window. Note that the pedestal is placed so the base of the vase is in the light. I want the whole of the shot equally flooded with light. This is harder on the table because it is so much lower. The solution? Lift everything up.
I have adjusted the exposure in these two images so it is possible to see where the light is bouncing. Zoom in on this and really look at where the light is coming in, and where it is bouncing. There are a lot of round things in this image, which adds to a rich, textural feel. Not just the urn (look at the relative light and shadow on the belly of it) but also chair and table legs. Even the snips that I left accidentally on the table are reflecting. If you walked into my sitting room, you probably wouldn’t notice the uneven texture of the lime plaster, but this angle of light to camera (exactly 90 degrees in the horizontal plane) just brings everything to life.
NB: I don’t have many windows, but the one single one I do have does a great job because I have learned how to use it. Big windows generally give softer light. If you are thinking of buying a house with French windows, do it. You have won the photography lottery.
I have spent a lot of time making my sitting room very lovely and old, and I know you might be thinking that you haven’t got a space like this. However, I truly believe that, if you understand the magic of side light, you can make any space look good. To prove a point, I took the a few poppies to the dreadful decor of cottage no 3, and I still manage to make it look ok.
Yes, I used a backdrop, because that wallpaper is woodchip.
The absolute luxury is to have a place permanently set up for your flower portraiture. If you have enough space, I strongly recommend. This is your moment to go and have a look around your house and try and find windows and doors that you might not have considered as options for light sources. Here’s a secret - if you are willing to get up early so you get lovely soft light (on which more below), greenhouses make fabulous photography studios if you want the vintage, overexposed look.
Take your egg.
This is a long term exploration of space, so try first thing in the morning, at noon, and at dusk.
Oh, and if you need a backdrop to frame your flowers, you will need a bigger one than you ever imagined necessary. I don’t know why either, but it catches me out every time.
I didn’t review the picture properly until I had taken down the whole set up, and I sort of wished I hadn’t. You can tell this is a phone shot because it captures the detail in both the flower and the fabric. I find this quite distracting - I would have preferred the poppies to, well, pop, and the backdrop to be a soft colour, rather than a texture. If I was using a camera, I would have been able to manage this a lot better, but this is principle III, so I can’t talk about it yet. But what I will say is that I like the composition, I like the angles, I love the light, but the aperture is wrong. And then when you get to principle III, you’ll know exactly why I have included it in this guide.
Principle II: Hard light, soft light.
If you are holidaying in Cornwall this summer, you must go to St Ives to see the light. Beloved of painters and sculptors, it is compulsory to comment on how lovely the light is. A few weeks ago, I managed to snatch an hour or so to get to St Ives to visit Leach Pottery whilst the other Dr A was doing one of his long-distance bike rides, and what I saw were some inconvenient roadworks and inadequate parking, but I probably wasn’t entirely in the mood.
Apparently, this loveliness is a product of the fact that St Ives has bouncing light. All light bounces to some extent (white surfaces bounce light a lot, black bounces a little) but St Ives is almost surrounded by the sea and by very white beaches and so the light is bouncing around all over the place. Why is bouncing light lovely? Because it is soft…
If you feel like you are getting lost with this, stop thinking about hard and soft light, but think about hard and soft shadows. This top picture is such hard light, I don’t know what I was thinking. Directional. Sort of impressive, but I don’t love it.
The following two images are from my favourite photographer of all time, Andrew Montgomery. Take a few minutes to look at them. Where is the light source? (hint: like anyone would take anything except from the side.) How close is it? What does this do to the shadows on the table/window sill? How hard or soft are they? How does this hardness/softness affect the shading within the flowers? How different are the highlights and lowlights? Which do you prefer? Apologies for the resolution of these. You can find the originals here.
I am struggling to demonstrate this with pictures because it is pouring with rain today, but I will do my best. If you are inside and photographing flowers, here are some things that will give hard light.
A small light source – imagine the difference between the torch on your phone and the light from the screen of your phone. There probably isn’t that much difference between the amount of light (I haven’t measured this) but the screen light is softer because it is coming from a bigger area. Lovely big windows will give amazing light (see above re French windows), if your window is a bit pokey, you might have to think a bit harder about it. Strangely, this can be a bit situation-specific; the light from my back door goes into a smaller bootroom and ever though the back door is bigger than the window, it gives much stronger, directional light, and therefore harder shadows. So use your egg to check your light sources. They might surprise you.
A very sunny day - beams of sunlight, think dust motes dancing in a sunbeam, are terribly poetic, but a nightmare for getting that lovely soft light.
How far you are from your light source - ok, so there is something very complicated about how shadows work depending on how big your light source is, vs how far away from it you are. (A better explanation than I can give here, make sure you read all the way to the end, but do not read the comments. They are brutal.)
This is a tutorial about flowers indoors, but if you have ever tried to photograph a garden on a beautiful summer day, you’ll know it looks dreadful. The eye can unflatten and find the differences between subtle shade of green and slightly different textures, the camera can’t. They look like wilderness.
Even indoors, blue sky days are not days for getting your camera out. There is just too much light and the shadows are just too harsh. My photography window is east facing and so there is a very very short window as the sun rises when the light comes straight through it. I do not take photographs then. I wait until the sun has moved on and is shining on the south side of the house and bouncing in (not shining in) the window. Some days, if the sky is very blue, the light is still too strong, and so I have a diffuser that fits in the window. Some very thin fabric draped, or tracing paper taped, will do exactly the same job.
This is why the very very best time to take a photograph in a garden is the time when the sun is below the horizon and the soft light is just bouncing around everywhere. Yes, that is about 4am in the English summer. No, I am not getting up at that time.
Low number on left, bigger number on right.
Principle III: How to pick out the special bits.
Aperture. There are lots of people who will tell you about the lens opening being bigger and smaller, but honestly, I can’t remember which way round it goes and it really doesn’t matter. What you do need to know is:
Low number on aperture = one special thing = narrow depth of field
High number of aperture = see everything = big depth of field
I do love my walls, but the texture on them is really distracting when what I want you to be looking at is my glorious dahlia. I do not want this to be in focus, so I dial down the aperture to the lower range.
This is probably the time to say that I photograph almost exclusively in Aperture priority, because the most important thing I need to control (as in, the thing I find most important in my pictures, that I can’t control in editing) is that lovely ‘picked out’ look. It’s all very fashionable.
f = 1.8. Look how blurry the urn is
The same picture, but f = 7.1
The options for the settings are:
Automatic – the camera controls everything and you might as well be using a phone
Aperture priority - you tell the camera how much you want to pick out detail, and the camera does the maths and works everything else out
Shutter priority - you tell the camera how fast the thing you are photographing is moving (racehorses need a fast shutter speed, a spaniel at a slow shamble, less so). The things I photograph really do rarely move in any meaningful sense, so I have never used this.
Manual - the camera just does what you tell it, and you have to manually set aperture, shutter speed, If you are happy on manual mode, congrats, you get bragging rights, but I don’t know why anyone would do this. The photographer who did lots of my first photography about ten years ago is also a sports photographer and I think, how on each can anyone get all those settings in the right place when a professional cyclist is going past at a hundred miles an hour? At least flowers generally stay still. What I am saying is, I can navigate a complex ring road system in a car whilst also counting backwards form 300 in sevens, but why would I? I am sticking to what I do best, and my camera is, quite frankly, cleverer than I am.
If you are interested in learning more about this, there is some more knowledgeable information here.
The iphone has tried to do low aperture photography but ‘portrait mode’ but it is a fake. What it is doing is using AI to try and work out what you want to see (where the yellow box is), picking that out , and blurring everything else. Great for faces, but flowers have stems and it looks so odd to blur out these so starkly and leave the blooms.
Don’t go below 4 for people or products, 2.8 absolute minimum for dahlias or roses, 1.8 only for very frothy plants.
About 35 degrees in the vertical axis, 45 on the horizontal.
Just above square on the vertical axis, 45 degrees (one step to the right) on the horizontal.
Principle IV: Angles
I didn’t know how far I’d come until I watched someone else take a photo. I feel terrible because it was my husband and I am going to have to criticise his technique to illustrate my point.
We were in the new cottage, drinking champagne, talking about where to put the bathroom. The champagne was lovely and given to us by my brother and sister-in-law, and we wanted to send them a quick snap on whatsapp, just to say thank you. As I saw my husband frame the picture, I howled ‘the angles’, wrestled the phone from his hand, and took the photo myself.
The offending picture therefore doesn’t actually exist and, given that it is 10 o’clock on a weekday morning I have had to recreate it with tea. I could see the reasoning. It was tricky to deal with back light, cropping out the main road, getting the label in etc etc, but I still couldn’t let it happen.
This is the thing that makes photos look amateur, and this is the thing that, if you change, it will make you look like an absolute pro.
Angles.
Lines.
This is so hard to explain in words, but I will try. Stand straight on to your flower. From the square on angle, you can move the camera up and down, although straight on, just above straight on, and 45 degrees will give the best results. Obviously, you can also go to 90 degrees, but then you have to call it a flatlay. Let’s call this the vertical axis.
Return to square on, take a step to the side. You can now take a picture at a slightly softer angle, say 45 degrees. Let’s call this the horizontal axis. Keeping the vertical axis unchanged (I usually go for zero degrees), you can vary the horizontal axis to get your flower’s best angle. (If you are using a tripod, just turn the flower in the vase…)
What you cannot do, must not do, is take a picture where you are using some random angle on both the horizontal and vertical axis. This way madness lies. One of the big problems is that if you are walking around with your phone in your hand, you are likely to take every single one of your photos from about five foot off the ground, and to point the camera at whatever it is you want to photograph. Stop. Get square with it.
As well as getting up at 4am for the golden hour, real photographers lie on their fronts a lot, especially in gardens. If you can do this, it will change your life. I tend not to, and I get by.
And I think that will do for now.
That is a lot of info, and a lot of eggs to get through. Further blog posts coming up on how to make it super moody, how I edit, and a very niche indeed, box photography.