Cultivate Flower Photos, Visit a Botanical Garden

If you like to photograph flowers and plants but don't have the time or room for a garden at home, consider making a trip to a local botanical garden. Even if you do garden a lot at home, you'll get to see things at a botanical garden that most home gardeners could simply never grow and in quantities that are extraordinary. Wherever I travel in the world, in fact, one of the things that I seek out are the local gardens and botanical collections.

Most gardens have two types of displays: formal outdoor gardens and indoor conservatories. Longwood Gardens just south of Philadelphia, for example, has around 1,000 acres of outdoor gardens and more than 4.5 acres of indoor gardens! In fact, the conservatory contains more than 5,500 different types of plants growing in 20 different gardens. Another favorite haunt of mine is the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx and it features 250-acre landscaped acres, 50 curated display gardens, a 50-acre native Forest and more than a million different plants--all waiting to be photographed. I photographed the water lilies shown here at the NYBG in one of several nice reflecting pools behind the main conservatory (I also photographed a family of 11 baby ducks in the same pool).

These are some of the big guns, of course, but I've found wonderful small gardens in places like Corpus Christi, Texas and Tucson, Arizona and I've even got a small but terrific rose garden in a park just up the street from where I live. Wikipedia has a great listing of gardens organized by state and odds are you'll find one that's within a short drive. Don't forget to check YouTube, also, you're sure to find lots of videos of formal gardens and botanical parks.

One other thing that I like about photographing in a botanical garden, by the way, is that they usually have a staff of gardeners who work continually to deadhead old blooms and weed the gardens so that you don't have to worry about a great shot being ruined by a few raggedy blossoms. Even better, you can ask the gardeners lots of questions about how they keep the gardens looking so nice.

Live the Boy Scouts' Motto: Be Prepared

I have a good friend who works as a lawyer in New York City and sends me lots of photos from his cell phone. Dismal as cell phone photos are in quality, he has a great eye for the little oddities that make life interesting--old billboards, funny signs, snippets of daily life and even the occasional incredible sunset. I hate to think of him careening through the streets of the Bronx with one eye on the road and another on the cell phone screen, but it appears that a lot of his pictures are shot from his car window. Safe driving aside, his photos make a great point: we all encounter tons of quirky little photo ops almost every single day and all you need is a good eye and a handy camera to capture them.

That's the secret to a lot of good photography: always have a camera with you because you can never predict when a great photo will reveal itself to you. I shot the photo above in Rhinebeck, New York while driving through a pretty neighborhood, admiring the fine older homes. I spotted the bicycle/flower planter in front of a small inn and just stopped the car in the middle of the block to shoot it; fortunately it was a slow street and no one was behind me. Fortunately too, I had a good camera on the seat next to me and the right zoom lens all waiting to go. Maybe it's pure laziness, but I'm not sure if I hadn't had the camera ready to shoot that I would have bothered stopping to get the camera out to make the shot. The photo has since turned up in at least one of my books, several of my online lessons and it's been popular on Flickr, so I'm glad I did make the photo.

While I hope you won't be one of those people that I give dirty looks to for talking on (or heaven forbid shooting pictures with) their cell phones while driving, you can still keep a camera with you wherever you go. You might not want to drag a DSLR with you every time you go out to the supermarket, but there are lots of high quality digital point-and-shoot cameras that will fit in a shirt pocket. They make a great second camera. Or you can do what my friend does: just shoot with your cell phone and email pictures to your friends while you're stopped in traffic.

Improvise Lighting for Night Subjects

The night-blooming cereus is one of the most beautiful and mysterious flowers I've ever seen. The flower blossoms are the size of dinner plates, they have a heavenly scent and one of their most fascinating qualities is that the blossoms only bloom for one night and then they're gone.

I have several large cereus plants growing in pots in my yard and you have to pay close attention as they get ready to bloom, because they only start to indicate (by a curling of the flower stem) that they're going to bloom on the night they bloom and they don't begin to open after dark. Then by dawn the huge flower heads are folded up and hanging limp from their stems.

Normally I try to keep a close eye on the plants and try to predict when they'll bloom, but this night I was taken totally by surprise when I went out to check on its progress after midnight and found this blossom almost totally open. I took this shot at 3 a.m. and because I wasn't expecting it to flower that night, I didn't have the energy to design and set up a real lighting plan. Instead I brought out an odd mix of small lighting components and reflectors and improvised a somewhat Rube Goldberg-like lighting set up. I tried just shooting with the built-in flash on my Nikon D70s for the first few shots but the light was, predicatbly, very flat and even. So I think placed a small Morris Digital Mini Slave Wide (it operates on AA batteries) behind and under the flower to separate the rear petals a bit. I also placed a silver-foil reflector (just aluminum foil on a sheet of foam board) in front of the flower to bounce some of that light back into the face of the flower.

The shots were better, but the blossom still looked kind of flat. Since the flower looked like it was at its peak and I didn't want to go find a better flash set up, I just grabbed the flashlight that I was using to find may way around in the darkness with and tilted its adjustable head to toward the flower. Because it had a fairly focused beam, I was able to point the flashlight across the center of the flower and just light individual petals. It's that flashlight that is creating the warm highlights toward the center of the bloom. It still wasn't the best lighting job I could have done, but at 4 a.m. with raccoons skittering around me and a skunk digging grubs in the next yard a few yards away, it was all the effort I was going to make.

Every year I promise myself that I'm going to design a multiple-flash set up and give these incredible blossoms the lighting they deserve, but every year the night they blossom takes me by surprise and I end up improvising again. But don't discount your ability to light things acceptably, even nicely, with whatever you have at hand--slaves, flashlights, penlights--they all provide light. Whatever your night subject is, all it takes is a little experimentation, some fresh batteries and a stick to keep the raccoons away and you'll create some really interesting night shots.

In an upcoming posting I'll introduce you to some of the coolest night photos that you'll ever see--and tell you about the fascinating guy that shoots them. Stay tuned!

Reflect on Less Conventional Compositions

In some ways photography can be a very literate graphic medium: if you aim the camera at a sailboat passing through the sunset everyone will look at your photograph and know exactly what you had in mind when you shot it. But just how obvious your subjects are is really up to you--they can be literate and straightforward, or you can spin them slightly into the abstract.

One way to turn away from reality a bit is to literally turn away from your subject and look for its reflection. You can find reflections in some of the most unexpected places--shiny car fenders, polished car hubcaps or even in the surface of a puddle after the rain.

I shot the photo here in Galilee, Rhode Island (a beautiful New England fishing village if you're looking for one too shoot) during the peak of a very colorful sunset. But after spending about 20 minutes watching the sunset get more and more intense and framing it against very common subjects like the rigging on fishing boats and a ferry boat passing by, I wanted to find something that would capture the color and drama of the sunset in a dramatic but more freeform way. As I walked along the pier between giant fishing boats, I noticed that the sunset was reflecting in the almost quicksilver surface of the water and so I tried to shoot photos of just the reflection--but something was missing. The shot could have been made anywhere and I wanted it to have some connection to the locale.

Then as I came out between two boats tied to a narrow dock, I saw this rope hanging down into the sunset from the side of a fishing boat and it was exactly what I was after. I don't know if anyone else gets the sunset/fishing boat connection, but because of the snippet of the boat in the shot, I'll never forget where I shot it. The waterline stripe on the boat and the rope bring back the moment perfectly for me. I've made other similar shots of reflections to get the same effect--once photographing the Eiffel Tower in the reflection of a tour-bus window and another time photographing neon signs reflecting in the windshield of a car in Las Vegas.

Sometimes turning away from your subject and looking for reflections is the best way to find new viewpoints. Not everyone will appreciate your flights into whimsy, but who cares. It's a great exercise in expanding your creative reach.

Indulge Your Wanderlust

I love to travel. In fact, as much as I like hanging around the house and poking around my garden on a summer day, there is no single thing I'd rather do with my time than see other places. I think I can lay the blame for this on my mother who also loved to travel and who handed me a copy of John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley when I was about 15 and looking for something interesting to read. The book, which remains one of my all-time favorite reads, documents several months that Steinbeck spent wandering the back roads of America at age 58 to get back in touch with the country and the people that he had been writing about for so long.

In his travels, Steinbeck avoided interstates and major named routes and instead traveled the "blue highways," the roads that crisscrossed America before the major routes were built. While he had a general idea of where he was headed, he more or less made up the trip from day to day. Photographically, that is my favorite way to see a place--to just throw a cooler of food in the trunk, ignore the maps as much as possible and go where the road takes me. (Fortunately I have a girlfriend that is just as much of a back-road wanderer as I am.)

I'd never been to the Amish are of Pennsylvania before when I took the above photo. We'd spent a few days at Longwood Gardens south of Philadelphia and just decided to explore the Amish farms on the way back to New England. Most of the roads in that area didn't even show up on the maps, so we just drove until we hit a head end or we intersected another road (one of the main towns in the area is called Intercourse--named, I assume, after a joining of roads). We spent one very long day driving past the most beautiful farms I'd ever seen, buying fresh produce from farm stands and just relishing a landscape without commercialism. The area is so photogenic that I was finding great photos in all directions; I shot hundreds of pictures in one day. We never looked at a map until the late began to fade and we started looking for the highway north.

When you plan your summer vacation this year, work in a few days to indulge your wanderlust. Some of the best photo locales in the world are in the places you only discover by exploring.

Liberate Static Subjects from the Center

When it comes to consistently composing interesting photographs, we all have to fight our bad habits. One of the things I constantly have to fight against is my tendency to simply place subjects smack in the middle of the frame. It's surprising that I'm so susceptible to this because I think one of my best talents in photography is having a good eye for composition.

I think part of the reason that I fall victim to this so often is that I grew up with cameras where the metering and focusing indicators were always in the middle of the frame--so it became necessary to put the main subject in the middle, at least temporarily, to frame and meter it. Today, of course, most cameras have matrix metering that covers the entire frame and multiple focusing indicators so that no matter where the subject is, the camera will meter and focus correctly. But, hey, old habits die hard and I still find myself nailing things to the middle of the frame.

Creatively speaking, however, the center of the frame is a dead zone. Because your subject is surrounded by equal amounts of space both horizontally and vertically there is no spatial tension, no sense of impending motion on the part of your subject. Your subjects just hang there in the middle like the bullseye of a target.

Over the centuries artists have devised methods for finding more dynamic and pleasing subject placements. The most familiar of these, of course, is the "rule of thirds" that you've surely read about. To use this method you simply divide the frame into both horizontal and vertical thirds and then place your main subject at one of the intersections of those lines. The red-wing blackbird shown here, for instance, is roughly at the point where the left third line (vertically) and the bottom third line (horizontally) intersect. It's a simple method for off-center subject placement and it really does provide a good mental guide for subject placement. Some cameras even have a grid on the focusing screen though I think that's a bit of overkill--the rule of thirds is a creative guideline, not a precise instruction.

Another method that many artists used is a somewhat more complex (but related) design technique that is based on the "Golden Mean" or the "Golden Section" as it's sometimes called. The principle is based on a mathematical ratio that, again, divides the frame into a pleasing gridwork into which you can place your subjects. Entire books have been written about the Golden Mean and it's a fascinating subject. Watch this YouTube video for a very basic summary of using the principle as a design tool. For a more mystical look, watch this video.

Taking the main subject out of the center of the frame will immediately improve almost all of your photographs and you'll find yourself creating much more interesting and pleasing designs.

Get Serious: Use a Tripod (Part II)

Now that I've got you convinced that it's time to buy a tripod (see previous post), let me give you some of my specific reasons why you need one--at the very least so that you can explain to your spouse why you need to spend more money on yet another photo accessory.

• Sharper pictures: Obviously this is one of the primary reasons for owning a tripod. No matter how good your image-stabilization system is, a tripod is better because it lets you shoot sharply at any shutter speed. (By the way, in most cases you should shut stabilization off when you're using a tripod because otherwise the camera make make pictures less sharp rather than more--I'll explain this in a future post.)
• More Shutter Speed Options: Using a tripod makes all shutter speeds (even time exposures) available to you. You could never take a shot like this 28-second exposure of a Ferris Wheel without a tripod--just can't be done. Similarly, if you want to create the "ribbons of water" effect in a shot of a waterfall or to create traffic streaks at night, you can't do it without a tripod. City skylines at night without a tripod? No way.
  
• Depth of Field Control: Getting extensive depth of field (near-to-far sharpness) should be a primary consideration in most types of photography (like landscapes) and unless you're shooting in bright sunlight or raise the ISO to a noisy level, you can't shoot at f/16 or f/22 without a tripod--especially as the light grows dimmer (twilight, cloudy days, misty days). I can't count the number of nice landscapes that I've ruined by not having enough depth of field before I dedicated myself to using a tripod. You can't shoot a landscape with edge-to-edge depth of field (see the previous post) without a tripod.
  
• Exposure bracketing: Exposure bracketing allows you to shoot three (or more) rapid exposures of the same scene with one press of the shutter button (in continuous shooting mode). But you will never get the exact framing in all three shots unless you have your camera on a tripod. You'll have three different exposures with three slightly different compositions--what is the point of that?
  
• High Dynamic Range Imaging: And speaking of making bracketed exposures, that's a required part of HDRI, a popular technique that consists of taking multiple identical compositions each at a different exposure setting. There's no way to align those frames exactly without using a tripod.
• Panoramic Stitching: While I've done some panoramic stitches shooting hand held, that's a very experimental way to shoot. If you really want a high quality pan shot, the camera must be mounted on a tripod.
• Slower Pace: This is, to me, one of the most important reasons for using a tripod: it slows you down. Very often photographers put quantity ahead of quality--thinking that more pictures of a subject means better results. I'd rather get one great carefully executed shot of a landscape than 20 "almost" shots.

Using a tripod forces you to consider all the elements of a potential shot: exposure, depth of field, sharpness, creative shutter speed and it lets you consider using special techniques like HDRI. By the way, it also takes the burden off of your shoulders when it comes to holding equipment all day. Personally I'd rather haul a tripod into the field for 10 minutes than try to shoot with a 400mm hand held for hours on end without one.

There, I've given you my tripod lecture!