Exploring the Ozarks Outdoors: freshare.net

Photographing Wildflowers

by Suzanne Wilson

First posted on 06-17-2009

A professional photographer shares his ideas about capturing wildflowers on film.

It’s 7 a.m. on a warm day in mid-June: light breezes, high cirrus clouds, tall prairie grasses lit through with low sunlight.

Here we have pale purple coneflower, bright yellow loosestrife, deep pink wild rose. And here we have a photographer, oblivious to the fact that his shoes and pant legs are soaked from walking through the dew-laden grass. His attention is concentrated simultaneously on a fringed green orchid, the light, the wind, the background, the equipment.

Conservationist photographer Jim Rathert has traveled to Diamond Grove Prairie in southwest Missouri to photograph wildflowers. Remember the March 1993 Conservationist cover? Rathert stood in waist-deep water to photograph those pink water lilies, so today’s immersion in wet prairie grass seems easy by comparison.

In fact, this is what Rathert calls a “friendly environment” for beginning wildflower photographers. “The thing about glades and prairies is they’re simple,” says Rathert. You can easily walk into them, and the flowers you are photographing are at an accessible level. The light on a prairie is simple too, compared with the dappled shade in a woodland. Still, there are plenty of challenges, plenty of lessons to learn here.

Whether you have a simple camera or more sophisticated equipment, many ideas from this tag-along session with Rathert will apply to your wildflower photography. A close-up lens makes a difference, of course, and some point-and-shoot cameras have them.

You may use either print or slide film. For our prairie shoot, Rathert has loaded a 35mm single lens reflex camera with 100 speed slide film, since slides are necessary for reproduction in the Conservationist.

For wildflowers, he usually starts with a 105mm macro lens - a short telephoto lens that allows a photographer to work at a comfortable distance from the subject, while the macro feature produces a close-up image.

If you don’t have a macro lens, you can shoot close--ups of flowers by attaching an extension tube or a close--up lens to a standard lens in the 5Omm to 2OOmm range. For a photo of flowers in a wider prairie setting, a wide angle lens works well.

Rathert recommends the use of a lens hood all the time. It cuts out glare, which is especially noticeable when shooting toward the sun.

“The wind is a problem,” says Rathert, “because movement is your real nemesis in photography.” One of the first lessons is how to cope with breezes that set every plant in motion, guaranteeing flowers will be blurred. The need for a close-up complicates matters. As you increase the magnification of the image on film, you magnify the problems of movement.

With a camera that allows you to set the shutter speed, a short exposure time (1/250 second) can stop movement. But a certain amount of light always must reach the film, so when you increase the shutter speed, the lens aperture must be set to open wider. This reduces the depth of field (the range of sharp focus), which may result in a photo with only the center of a flower subject in focus and near and far petals blurred.

To photograph the entire flower in focus, it may take a smaller aperture (like squinting an eye to see more sharply), and that requires a slower shutter speed. A good aperture range to use, Rathert says, is f11 to f16. (The f-stop numbers get larger as the opening gets smaller.) With the fringed green orchid, Rathert’s exposure is f11 at 1/60 second.

The best solution for wind is patience. “Even on a rather blustery day,” says Rathert, “you tend to get a little bit of a lull, just momentarily.” You wait for that moment of stillness.

Another source of movement is the photographer holding the camera. “Someone told me the second lens you ever buy should be a tripod,” says Rathert. In other words, before you even think about adding lenses, get the tripod. “Always shoot from a tripod, that’s an absolute. It’s just like throwing money away when you try to do wildflower photography without using a tripod.” Most cameras will attach to one.

Carrying a tripod tends to slow you down as you wander, but that’s good, because you take more time to look around and think. You’re a photographer, not a bee, so there’s no need to flit quickly from flower to flower. You encounter a plant you like, move around it, decide where you want the camera. Perception and contemplation are as important as any equipment you carry or techniques you know.

And if you take your time, you gain more than a photograph. “I think photography is a kind of conduit into appreciation of nature,” Rathert says.

The reason we are out at 7 a.m. is the light. Rathert was on the prairie last evening too, and the light kept improving toward sunset, while he was photographing pale blue prairie larkspur. “You get every bit of color out of them in the soft low light,” he says. Compared to midday, the sun in morning and evening is at a lower angle and more distant, so shadows are softer.

Various types of light enhance specific color groups. Birdsfoot violet photographs well under an overcast sky because blues and purples are accentuated by that cool bluish light. Red and yellow flowers benefit from the warmer, more balanced light from a clear sky.

We’re fortunate today to have the early light softened further by thin clouds. But even good light can sometimes use improvement.

Reflecting light

There are times when it helps to bounce daylight onto the shady side of a plant to brighten it up. That would take one of those reflective collapsible disks, like the one Jim Rathert usually carries, wouldn’t it? Not necessarily. The disk is in the shop, so he stopped by a craft store and purchased an inexpensive rectangle of foam-core. It’s a flat thin sheet, lightweight and white. Leaned against nearby grass, it lights up a flower.

Diffusing light

Lucky for us, he also left his diffuser back in the studio, so he’s carrying a homemade version we can copy, two yards of lightweight white interfacing normally used in sewing, plus two dowel rods. With the ends of the interfacing taped together and the dowels placed inside to stretch it, it’s a translucent screen with legs that can be stuck into the ground. You simply place it between the sun and your subject when you need softer light.

Why diffuse the light? There’s a difference in the way a human sees the world and the way a camera records it on film. When there are brightly lit places and deep shadows in a flower you’re photographing, your eyes adjust to see detail in the lightest and darkest areas, but the film can’t render the detail as you see it. A diffuser softens the contrast between light and dark, allowing the film to capture meaningful detail. The flower itself, rather than strong contrast, becomes predominant in the image.

With this inexpensive diffuser, you can keep shooting into the midday hours and achieve an effect closer to early light. Using it on one side of your subject and the reflector on the other, you can make a flower glow. And in a wood- land, the diffuser moderates sun-and-shade dappling.

Diffusion is the reason photographers like to shoot under an overcast sky. “It’s like having a big diffuser you don’t have to carry with you,” says Rathert.

Filtering light. If we had an overcast sky today, an amber filter over the lens would warm the prairie colors. In a shady woodland, a light amber or magenta filter corrects the effect of greenish light on flowers.

Other possibilities. A camera with a built-in spot meter, like Rathert is using, measures light precisely in a small area, such as a flower petal. This helps the photographer decide how to control color in the image. The “correct” exposure the camera selects will render the fringed green orchid in a shade of green equivalent to middle gray, not the lighter green it is, so Rathert changes the exposure to add “a half a stop of light.”

Another wildflower lighting alternative is a strobe light (electronic flash). The image will be distinctly different from the natural setting, with the flower fully illuminated and the background black. The advantage here is the rendering of detail, useful for plant identification, so it’s the method preferred by botanists. A strobe is also useful in the limited light of woodlands, stream banks and bluffs.

The best approach is to position the strobe off-camera, mimicking the angle of natural light.

Will you go for an image of the flower head, the whole plant, a dynamic group of blooms, or what Rathert calls “the lushness of the prairie tapestry”? Where will you place your subject in the frame? (Try it off-center.) From what direction will the sunlight come in the photo? Will you select a background of grasses or include the sky?

“One of the keys is being able to perceive the entire scene,” says Rathert, including “the negative space or the background.” The flower is the positive image, and its placement in the frame creates interesting negative shapes around it. Those shapes, along with color, contrast, form and texture, make up the design of your photograph.

Rathert often takes his camera off the tripod and moves around a flower, looking through the viewfinder, to “search for the photograph.” (A quick-release plate lets him remove and replace the camera instantly.) Then he positions the tripod, which can go up to eye level or down almost to the ground.

When you photograph, look at the background through the viewfinder. One drop of dew catching light can become a distracting “hot spot” in your photo, or maybe there’s a microwave tower on the horizon. “Believe me, if you don’t see it before you take the photo, you’ll definitely see it later when you get it back from the processor,” Rathert says. Some cameras allow you to stop down the aperture momentarily to let you see what the camera sees.

This flower’s face is turned to the sky, so Rathert positions the tripod and camera almost directly over it. When he focuses on the rose, a tiny insect lights on it- an immature longhorn grasshopper,” he says.

The blossom will dominate the image, with the diagonal lines of grasses complementing the flower’s form. Rathert uses his camera’s spot meter to measure light on a petal.

Bracketing, he says as he sets up the shot, is a good idea for beginners. Bracketing means shooting three frames, changing the aperture or shutter speed to increase and decrease the amount of light. It’s good insurance, as opposed to shooting just one frame at the metered exposure. “You want to be sure you get the photograph,” Rathert says, “especially in unique situations.”

The wind stops, and he shoots the picture, but the light has become contrasty. He moves the diffuser in. “We’re seeing color now,” he says.

He lowers the camera so the rose will fill up more of the frame. The flower is slightly off-center in the composition. “Oh, this is good stuff, a little grasshopper, a little bee. Now it’s becoming an insect photograph. It goes in the insect file,” he jokes.

He moves the homemade reflector in. “Oh wow! See the difference, uniform good rich color throughout.”

Rathert is now shooting at f5.6, second. The fast shutter speed will stop the wing movement of the bee, and Rathert can get by with a larger aperture because the subject area is shallow, so limited depth of field isn’t a problem. One more shot.

Whether it goes in the flower file or the insect file, this one is definitely a keeper.

Better wildflower photos

Here’s some good advice from Jim Rathert that will produce a handsome bouquet of wildflower photos:

* Become knowledgeable about wildflowers. Look through field guides, such as Missouri Wildflowers by Edgar Denison, published by the Conservation Department.
* Know your camera thoroughly and learn how each piece of equipment works.
* Visit different flower habitats-a glade, a spring area, a sandstone seep, a dry southern slope, a woodland-at different times of day.
* Photograph in all seasons. From the harbinger of spring to the last goldenrod, something is blooming somewhere. Rathert has photographed the tiny blooms of witch hazel, a woodland shrub, on the last day of January.
* Improve your technique by photographing one particular species whenever you encounter it. You’ll discover new approaches.
* Shoot often, keep written or mental notes, learn from your result. If you have flowers nearby, you can choose your time and light. Gardens are good places to experiment.

Share | |

Comments:

And lighting makes all the difference in photography, especially nature photography.

By Aaron on June 23, 2009 - 6:34 am

This is excellant information for all who love to shoot wildfowers or wildlife in nature. He has given some wonderful ideas on the lighting. Thank You

By Michelle on June 21, 2009 - 11:27 am