Composition tips for flowers?

Composition tips for flowers, anyone? It seems really easy to get a picture of a flower that looks like "hey, another snapshot of a flower!" but hard to get anything that stands out much. Yes, the flower is pretty, but the photograph itself is completely ordinary.

I can try to control DoF to isolate the flower somewhat, but I'm not finding that I get very satisfactory results that way. Either only part of the bloom is in focus or the isolation isn't that great. Using a deeper DoF and then blurring the background in post might be the way.

I'd prefer to avoid the overhead of setting up a complete studio still life, though that would certainly work.

Thanks!

Practice practice and then practice some more.

I have been having difficulty getting good photos of red roses. After experimenting, I found that setting -2 EV for this shot and processing the raw file in PhotoLab eliminated blown-out highlights and gave me an acceptable dynamic range.

Any advice for further improvement is welcome.

David

I came across this thread after seeing yours. It has some interesting compositions which might give you some ideas.

DOF generally is too shallow and you end up with parts of the bloom OOF. maybe look at stacking in and out of camera ?

Get low. Many flower shots are lazy...standing height looking down. This also changes the background from dull (ground) to lighter foliage or sky

Early morning or evening. This can also make some nice backlit shots. You could of course use flash or lighting

Wind moves blooms a lot - pick a still day or higher shutter speed

Water droplets and/or insects can add something to the mix

One bloom in the centre of the photo can be boring. Multiple blooms and/or move the flower off centre

Not saying all these are wonderful pics but I am taking them more for a record of my garden ! www.flickr.com/photos/144069317@N08/

I don't think a monitor can give you a more saturated red than that, if you still want some light and shade in the flower.

As for composition, placing the flower dead centre isn't ideal. You might crop some off the left or right sides. Was there anywhere that gave you two roses in the frame ?
Don

The Temecula Valley Rose Society has a nice article on one guy's technique for reliably photographing red roses using a gray card. It confirms that -1, -2, or even -3 exposure compensation is required to get a nice photo. I've used a gray card for other flowers that tend to blow out the red channel and it works very well.

I've also started experimenting with my camera's Highlight Metering mode and it works pretty well so far for some troublesome flowers. Highlight metering also winds up dropping exposure several stops.

With all these techniques, you wind up with dark backgrounds so there's some post-processing to be done.

I'm no flower expert but I do have many pictures of flowers and I can tell you which ones please me most over time.
-those taken in early morning or late afternoon indirect light, especially backlighting. If indoors, early light from east window
-super close ups with some abstraction
-those with rain or dewdrops
-if any background is included, those with pleasing backgrounds like rocks, ferns, tree trunk, greenery, or nothing at all (not dead stuff and potting soil )
-those with a bug walking around or a spider web
-those with noticeable flaws (I know most people don't agree, but these are my favorites)
-unusual angles

David, I noticed some saturation-clipping, see this HSV saturation map where the brightness level indicates the degree of saturation:

When the saturation is that high, the flower is almost a monochrome red which can lower color contrast. It would be interesting to find a red rose spectral reflectance curve to see how much blue and green there really is in the petals.

Not saying you did it in PS, David, but some folks edit flowers to taste in a wide gamut color space and then save as sRGB without checking for gamut clipping.

As to the exposure - saturation or, more properly, chroma% goes the opposite to what most people think. It increases with falling lightness - see a CIELAB 3D gamut diagram. In the map above, notice how the saturation level is high even in the shadows!

Thank you, lehill, for the link. It confirms what I have been discovering recently. The flowers are in a public garden and it would be next to impossible to get my grey card anywhere near the flowers. As you see, I have to use my 240mm lens because of the distance! So the answer for me is to do several bracketed exposures and deal with the over-dark problem in post processing. 😀

David

Have you tried a polarizing filter? It often helps with the reflections on foliage.

Expat,

Thanks for your contribution! I am not familiar with the program that made your histogram. Here are what I see in DXO-PL4 and Faststone. (I wish one could see histograms at a larger size on the screen and with control of the Y axis scaling...)

PL4 has a method of showing clipped pixels by means of false colours and I back off the exposure comp until these are no longer visible.

I did not do anything to edit the colour -- just levels.

Here is a crop of the bloom:

and DXO histograms:

By the way, I did use PS for cropping and all the jpegs on this page I saved at maximum quality (PS calls it "12").

David

Iliah,

Thanks for your suggestion about a polarizing filter, which I shall try. Actually, I dont mind the reflections on the leaves: it gives them character!

David

One thing I avoid is getting the flower dead center in the image - simply because that's what many folks do. At the very least, I favor offsetting the flower's center of area (centroid) by the good old Golden Ratio i.e putting it at about 0.6, not 0.5.

I would suggest researching background blur, rather than concentrating on DoF. You will then begin thinking about 'stacking' a set of images of the same flower, same camera position, same framing, na-ni-na, with the focus different in each shot. Stacking can be done with various Apps these days. About seven or more images are aligned then fancy software combines the best-focused areas into a single output image. Tedious but some find it quite rewarding!

Or ... only shoot flat flowers LOL

I often don't use the "full force", leaving the amount of reflections I want to be there ;)

I use the GIMP which is able to extract Hue, Saturation, or Value/Brightness from an image as three separate panes. It can do other color models too, like LAB.
Somewhere, I may still have a Windows utility which can do the same thing, tell me if you're interested.

Histograms don't help me much in assessing saturation.

Um, here's a red rose spectrum:

Stolen from thelandofcolor.com/hue-vs-color/ - quite worth a read ...

Looks like there should be some blue and green in a rose shot. Run a color-picker around yours, shouldn't be any zero blues or greens ...

Is the goal is a reproduction of a rose, or is it the perception? ;)

The goal varies with the photographer and can be the one or the other or a mixture of both. ;-)