I am branching out and want to get into the flower and plant photography more. This one was from the San Diego Botanical Gardens. I plan to make near future trips there.
Looking for suggestions and tips when photographing flowers and planets. I live in AZ so right now my best places to go are botanical gardens.
6D ii 100-400 ii 1/10 f/22 ISO 100 on tripod. Here I darken and reduced the background with LRC background mask.
Gorgeous hibiscus, Dean. The colors and the detail in the veins of the petals are wonderful. I’m with you on the going to the botanic gardens, this year the gardens seem to be the only place that has flowers! I am wondering if you used a polarizing filter? Sometimes this will help tone down the harsh whites. As for as the background, depends on what you are looking for? If you want the background to be included, your settings here work well. If you wanted more focus on the flower, depending on the distance from the flower to background, you could open up your f-stop and blur the background. Lovely capture and a wonderful place to be this time of year. Nicely done.
Happy to have a part of your journey into plant (planet? LOL) photography. I echo Linda’s observations and advice. Flower and plant photography can, and sometimes should, be considered to be two different disciplines. My approach here would be to isolate that flower for a flower photo - that means a wider aperture to obscure the bg and maybe a much tighter view to eliminate a lot of it. You could take a few photos and stack them to get more depth, especially because this is quite a large blossom. I would also have used a diffuser to create shade to eliminate hot spots and shadows. Sometimes I like direct sun on flowers to bring out petal detail and shape, but I try for a bit of filtering with sky or tree canopy whenever possible.
But the plant itself might be interesting too, but we need to see more of it to be effective. Hibiscus plants don’t thrive here, so I’d like to see more of its shape, structure and pattern of blooming. Backing up and including more would work to illustrate that. Again, you’d have issues with extreme contrast and harsh light so choosing early or late in the day would help or pick a cloudy one.
Keep bringing them to us! The flower season in northern Wisconsin is a short one so they are always great to see.
Thank you for the feedback @Kris_Smith and @linda_mellor I have taken some flower photography workshops and this pretty much follows the same thing you are saying. I agree sunlight doesn’t help so a cloudy day while doesn’t happen much here or a shield. I got a remote shutter for that very reason.
A round or oval collapsible diffuser will definitely help for close ups. Mine is very small, only about 12 or 14 inches across, but it’s handy and is light and fairly small.
