Shooting flowers with your digital camera indoors can be fun and rewarding, especially on those rainy or cold winter days. All you need is some flowers, good diffused light, a tripod, your camera and perhaps a piece of matt board for back ground.

Your first decision is whether or not you want to photograph the whole bouquet of flowers, a single whole flower or just a part of a flower.

For photographing a part of a flower you will probably need the macro setting.On some cameras there may be a flower symbol under the program mode, this usually means macro. On other cameras you may have a choice between a full macro mode setting where you can get extremely close to the subject or a normal macro setting that allows you to get close but not in the inches range.

My camera, subject and a piece of matt board and good window light from a bright snowy day outside.

The camera set on full macro mode allows you to get within inches of the subject. Here I wished to fill the frame with the interesting center pattern.

Color Saturation

Sometimes colors like red will over saturate the camera’s meter. The flower below is actually a magenta color. The left was shot at -1.0 EV, the middle at 0.0 EV and the right at +1.0 EV. Note how the -1 looks best in this case.

-1.0 ev  1 stop underexposed            0.0 ev  normal exposure                     +1.0 ev  1 stop over                        

Full Macro

When you move in very close like the example at the left you will have a very shallow depth of field (less focus depth). You will need to shoot at your highest f-stop which is why the tripod comes in handy. The image at the left was shot at f 6.3 with a shutter speed of 1/3 second. Since this was shot straight on the depth of field was not as critical as shooting from the side as in the example below.

If you want to photograph a single whole flower you can usually take your camera off the full macro mode and move out. You may want to try the normal macro mode if you have that option or sometimes if you move the camera away even more and zoom in you can get even better results. However with this arrangement you will probably get background in the scene which if not controlled can conflict with your main subject. In this example I removed the flower to a single vase since I only wanted the flower and not the bouquet. I then used a matt card behind to simplify the background even more. My matt board has a white side and a gray side. Compare the difference.

I changed the flower to a single bud vase, then used a white matt board behind it. The result is below. Note: no cropping or image manipulation was done to the image. Then I switched my matt board to the gray side. Both of these were shot with the normal macro mode.

When shooting multiple flowers that are spaced apart as with these carnations, the chief problem is depth of field. Also this may be a case where the spot focus will not work. Note the image comparisons below.

Notes on the background:

In the images at the left note the difference in the effect of the background on this white rose. The darker contrast makes it stand out much better and attracts attention to the rose.

Happy Flower Photography!