My Top Tips for Nature Photography
One of my favourite ways to pass time is to take myself for a walk with my camera, wandering over fields, through woods and over the hills. I usually have an idea what I’d like to photograph when I set off, keeping my eye out for colours, light and textures that catch my eye. I tend to focus on flowers, as I’m naturally drawn to subtle colours and soft shapes. I love the intricacy of petals, and how much detail there is when you get up close and really study a flower in more detail.
I get asked a lot about how I capture my photos of nature, so thought it was about time that I write a blog post talking about the subject in more detail. I tend to favor my Canon 600D when photographing flowers and plants - I love the softness of my 50mm 1.8 lens which allows me to get up close and capture the detail but with a lovely blur that keeps the image looking delicate. I almost always shoot with an aperture of 1.8 to hone in the focus on one small part of the image. I also use my Fujifilm X-T20 with my 35mm 1.4 lens for nature photography, as this allows me an even shallower depth of field - although I achieve a sharper image when shooting with this kit. All of the images in this post were taken with my Canon.
When I’m taking a photograph, I love to play around with focus - but especially with my nature photography. Someone recently commented on an Instagram post to say they enjoyed my unexpected use of focus and that really resonated with me. I really enjoy placing the focus of an image someplace out of the ordinary. I don’t want to take flat images where everything is in focus, or just go for the obvious focal point. I like to play around with the background and foreground, achieving a soft aesthetic with plenty of bokeh. I like the atmosphere and tactile nature of images with a soft focus.
To take photographs like the ones in this post, I first set my ISO to what is appropriate for the current light, set my aperture as low as possible (1.8/1.4) and set my shutter speed as high as possible. I usually like my nature photos to look quite dark, placing my frame to illuminate the image with natural sunlight. I then spend time playing around with the focus, using manual focus to try out placing the focus on different points of the frame. Ideally, I like something soft in the foreground of my images. I’ll usually get up close and personal to the flowers, so there are some flowers right in front of my lens that will naturally blur out of focus when I’m setting the focus on something behind them. Other times I just hold a flower or petal slightly in front of the lens to get a similar effect.
I prefer to shoot during golden hour for the best natural light, but also play around in post-production to darken my images and sometimes warm up the colours. I like everything to look quite moody but also warm. I’ve recently started adding a subtle grain to my photos to give them more of a film-like quality. I don’t do anything dramatic with editing though. I don’t like to have very sharp or high contrast images - I’m always thinking soft and warm both when I’m shooting and editing.
After writing this, I’m itching to get out my camera and take a stroll through the woods - so I’ll leave it there. If you have any questions, just ask!