The Secret Lair

Flower photography? At the Lair? That doesn’t seem very… Lair-ish, you say? Well, just because the Overlords take pleasure in leveling up their evil street cred at every opportunity doesn’t mean they don’t enjoy the finer things in life. For instance, Overlord Miller appreciates a nice flower bouquet brightening up the interrogation chambers or a lovely arrangement on his desk to help him relax and contemplate the development of the next doomsday device. I have even heard rumors that Overlord Johnson has been cultivating a nice little rose garden¹ on one of the upper terrace levels.

That being said, the Overlords do like to document their floral appreciations in photographic format. Of course, they want to take the best photos possible to highlight the beauty and wonderment that they so enjoy.²

So, without further ado, I come to you today to present a few tips and tricks to aid you in your quest to improve your mad flower³ photography skills.

Know Thy Camera⁴
So, you have a new shiny digital camera with lots of modes, buttons, and dials. Do you know what all those modes do? No? Go find a subject and try out each mode on that one subject. Keeping to the same subject while exploring the settings and modes on your camera will make it more apparent as to what each setting does. Most cameras also store these details in their meta data. So, if you forgot what you did on a particular image, you can go and look at the properties of your image file to see what the settings were. Also, it’s highly recommended that you learn about focal length/depth of field and shutter speed, and how it affects an image (if your camera allows you to manually adjust those settings).

Photo by modomatic

Rule of Thirds

It’s an old rule and has been well documented lots of times all over the place. While we do love a good dead horse beating here at the Lair, there’s only a few things you really need to know about this rule. If you divide an image into three equally spaced lines both horizontally and vertically (for nine equal parts total), any subjects/focal points that fall along those lines or any of the intersections will generally produce a stronger, more balanced image, than just centering the subject in the frame. Granted this isn’t 100% true of all good images, but it’s still a good rule to apply to help with photo composition.⁵ Take a look around at some good photos. You’ll find that this rule holds true for many of them. Try it. Use it. Love it.⁶

Fill the Frame
Filling the frame fills the image with interest. Zoom in⁷ and highlight just one flower or even just one aspect/detail of the flower. Maybe its petals fall in an interesting pattern, or the inside of the flower is lovely in its strangeness. Fill up the entire frame with your subject. Keep in mind when getting so close to your subject that your depth of field will decrease. So, you will want to pay extra attention to where you are focusing your camera as everything else in the frame may be blurry.⁸ This is a good reason to know thy camera and understand focal length.

Not only can you fill the frame with close up details, but landscape shots or shots of a handful of flowers can also work well with this composition technique. Don’t be constrained to macro photography to fill the frame. Look around and see if there’s a good view or cluster of blossoms that would fill the frame while still keeping the subject(s) the focal point and interest of the photograph. Depth of field is also your friend in this situation since distractions can be minimized by blurring them out.

Keep it Simple
Too much detail can detract from an image and distract the eye from the subject. Sometimes a simple, less is more, minimalistic approach is perfect for highlighting flowers. Make sure to remove any distractions from the frame when constructing this type of composition as they will be very noticeable. Botanical photography often uses this technique to really show off flowers.

A Different Perspective
We’ve all seen the photo of the full frame side view or top view rose bud a thousand times.⁹ Sure, it’s nice, but maybe there’s a more interesting perspective. Try different angles. More specifically, try angles that aren’t a typical view of your standard human. Get down low, shooting up at the flowers from the ground. Or, push your camera right into the middle of a patch of flowers. Look at the flower from all the angles you can think of. There’s bound to be an interesting and less generic shot there.

Now, with your new and improved knowledge, go out there and shoot some flowers.¹⁰

1. Of Death [↩]
2. …and something about having all behold their photographic prowess and despair [↩]
3. Mad flowers are currently being developed by The Secret Lair Botany Department. “You won’t like these flowers when they get ANGRY!” [↩]
4. In a platonic way, of course. [↩]
5. The Golden Mean, while similar to the rule of thirds, is not quite the same, but it also works well for composition. [↩]
6. Again, in a platonic way, of course. [↩]
7. You can do this by using your camera’s zoom feature or  just getting up nice and close to your subject. [↩]
8. Blurry isn’t a bad thing. In fact, as many a college frat boy knows, it can be a very very good thing. [↩]
9. Really. [↩]
10. Except in Ohio, where they have a catch and release program. [↩]

Tags: flowers, photography, Tips, tricks

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under Featured Articles, Monologuing, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.