I have a perennial garden in my front yard. It was planted by the woman who owned the house before my husband and I bought it last year. We moved into our house last July, and I've been enjoying our first full year here. Since I wasn't the one who planted all the flowers in my garden, I haven't really known when things were going to bloom, and so it's been exciting to watch it since this spring. Our house's former owner was a skilled gardener, and most gardeners who really know what they are doing plant so that there is something blooming at every point in the growing season, rather than planting things so that everything blooms at the same time. By planting this way, the garden always looks pretty, and it always looks different.
I've been trying to capture my garden as it blooms this year. Below are a few examples of photos I've taken this year that I will use to illustrate a few techniques.
This is a clematis that is in my backyard. The shot below is taken at point blank; me standing right in front of where it blooms. I took this shot to show the placement of the plant in my yard, but it is not an especially eye catching photo. This is a photo used for the sake of documentation, and it does not really show off the beauty of the plant. You can't even see the purple blooms on it in this shot.
Using my 18-200mm lens, I zoomed in on one of the plant's flowers to take this shot. Notice how the background blurs as I zoomed in, and also how the flower fills most of the frame. By placing the flower in the frame like this, the shot becomes all about the flower, and shows the detail and structure of the flower.
Zooming in on a flower, or in this case a weed, puts the focus on the flower. You can also open up your aperture to blur the background. Usually flowers occur in places where there is a lot going on in the background, whether it's all the other flowers and plants growing nearby, or houses or buildings in the background, or just the busy texture of grass. To make the flower stand out from busy backgrounds like this, the afore mentioned techniques are often used. I opened up the aperture of my lens to its widest to take this photograph of a dandelion. I also crouched down on my knees to take the shot at weed level, as it were. Positioning yourself level with the flower can make flower shots more interesting than shooting down on them while you are standing up.
Irises are one of my favorite flowers, so I was excited to see that a plant I had thought might be irises bloom in my garden this spring. Irises don't bloom for very long, so I had to act fast to capture them at their peak. The photo below was taken of an iris blooming in my front yard. I could crouch down low enough so I could shoot the iris so only the fence showed in the background. I positioned myself carefully, because the irises are toward the front of my yard, and if I'd shot some of the other blooms on the plant, the street would have been in the background, with parked cars and other unphotogenic items showing. I didn't want that, and didn't want a cluttered background, so I zoomed in on this particular flower, right after it had rained, which is always a nice time to capture flowers.
I wasn't thrilled with the fence background, though, so I clipped a flower and brought it inside my house where I'd set up a black backdrop. This is an excellent way to photograph flowers, because you don't have to deal with busy backgrounds, wind which can botch the focus of your shot, bugs or any other distractions. This is a more formal way to photograph flowers, but it can be striking, depending on the flower.
So there are a few ideas for you to try. Enjoy!
