CND Portfolio: Stop to Snap the Roses

I'm sure that almost everyone who has a camera has at one time or another taken a picture of a flower. I have never met anyone who hates flowers and most people tend to think flowers are great subjects for photographs. That's because they are! I love flowers and I love nature and I love taking pictures of both. The problem is making the flowers look interesting in the pictures.

Most folks tend to find a flower they like, step up to it, bend over at the waist, hover over said flower and snap the picture strait from the top. Now I'm not saying this is wrong, it will produce nice pictures of the flower. That's the great thing about photography. You can take the any picture the way you want to, how it strikes you. You have control over how to tell the story of your subject. So if that's the way the flowers look the nicest or prettiest to you then by all means do it.

If you look at most of my pictures you will see that I love it when the sky is deep blue. I love it even more when the sky is deep blue with some white clouds. However that means that rain is probably coming later in the day. So, I love incorporating the sky into as many pictures as I can. With flowers, I love to change the perspective of the pictures I'm taking. I will admit I am super lazy when it comes to changing perspective and height of my pictures most of the time. But, sometimes you have to get down and dirty to take interesting pictures. With this picture, getting below the flowers and looking up at them, allowed me to get the sky in the picture and gave me the interesting perspective I was hoping for.

These next few shots are from the side of the flower to give the flower depth. When shooting from strait on top of the flower, the image will come out flat. Shooting from the side shows the layers of the flower. Used with this technique, a long lens can give you a nice colorful and soft background, instead of a background full dirt and dead leaves.