Patrick Webster with Inkleys in Bountiful shares a cheap art solution and a way to personalize your home decor.
Photographing flowers is a great way to bring the outdoors, inside. By enlarging your photograph you are able to produce a bright, bold, big piece of art fairly inexpensively. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Equipment
Compact cameras usually don’t need anything to focus up close. Just switch to macro or super macro mode. Most compact cameras have this capability.
DSLR need equipment to focus closely. Macro lenses, extension tubes and close-up rings will allow the lens to focus up close. Of the three, close-up filters are relatively inexpensive. Just screw them on the front of the lens and away you go!
Settings
Compact cameras can be set to various color modes – vivid or landscape will raise the color saturation and contrast to give more snap to your prints.
DSLR’s will set colors various ways. Either vivid versus normal or by individually setting saturation and contrast a bit higher.
Use your landscape mode to put most of your scene in focus to emphasize a general view of the flowers. Use the macro mode to emphasize a single flower or even just a portion of a flower. On the macro setting your depth of focus is very limited, far less than an inch. This allows you to show a viewer exactly where you were looking in the picture.
Pick an overcast day or shoot in the shade. Bright sunny days puts harsh shadows and shiny glare on the flowers and leaves and does not allow the color to show through well. If you don’t have an overcast day available bring your own shade with a reflector or even just a white trash bag strung over a coat hanger. A polarizing filter will help remove some of the glare and help the colors show through. Change your white balance to shade to take some of the blue cast out of your photos.
Print and Display
Go Big! Beautiful 20×24 prints make wonderful wall decorations and bring light and life into any room.
Go multiple! Use smaller frames with multiple openings to highlight several photos in a single collection.
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