Photographing Flowers at Close Range

Going into the intimacy of flowers is only open to those that use macro lenses, a moment when backgrounds almost vanish and you’re in a brave new world.

I recently came across a comment on a website, someone claiming that everybody was photographing flowers at close range, with backgrounds out of focus, a trend that was, in the person’s point of view, an easy and boring way out to make photographs of flowers.

While I do agree that it does not work all the time – and I’ve seen some shoddy examples of the technique -, I also know, from experience, that besides being a good choice to separate main subject from a distracting background, there’s another reason that, from what I understood through reading the whole comment, the author did not figure out. Probably because he was not aware of it.

In fact, there’s another reason why we do get out of focus backgrounds when photographing flowers: it’s due to a technical limitation – thank God for that – of the lenses we use. I refer, obviously, to macro lenses, real macro lenses and not the close-up most people use to grab some flower shots.

I must admit that I do photograph a lot of flowers with a 100-400mm lens, also throwing backgrounds out of focus as much as I can, because the judicious use of out of focus color contrasting backgrounds does help to put the attention where I want: the flower. Again, because I tend to use the longer side of the lens – 400mm – and a wide aperture, the compression of planes creates a separation between the point in focus and the rest. I even play with before and after planes out of focus, when I get everything in the right place, to get some ethereal look to some images. It’s something I’ve been doing over and over for years and that somehow is second nature to me when I photograph flowers… and sometimes other subjects.

Now, I also like to photograph flowers with compact and Micro Four Thirds cameras and different lenses on DSLR, and I do like my backgrounds out of focus, but not all the time. It depends on what I want to tell people. But mainly, yes, I do like out of focus backgrounds. Sometimes, I just have to live with them, too.
Now that I’ve set the bearings for this article, let me say that when you get a real macro lens, you’re bound to work with narrow depths of fields, even if you close the lens down to f/22. That’s somehow what I wanted to show with two of the photographs in this series. The closer shots were both taken at f/22 and f/20 and… they lack almost any depth of field. How come, will some people ask?

Well, because that’s the way macro lenses work. Especially when working at the closest focusing distance there’s not much space in focus, even with so small apertures. So here it’s not something that the photographer defines, but a technical limitation that, I must say, works fine for me in this case. The shots for this article were all taken with the same lens, a EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro lens from Canon, on a EOS 50D body. In terms of light I used a front light Speedlite 580 EX II with a Lastolite Ezybox softbox, with a white background illuminated from the back with an old Speedlite 430 EZ at full strenght. Exposure on manual and flashes on manual, for complete control (usually at 1/250, the max synch speed allowed) using 3 Phottix Atlas triggers to make camera and the two flashes “talk” to each other.

This series of shot tells more than one might think at first glance. In fact, I am telling you a story about the intimacy of orchids in four single shots. In terms of thinking about what you shoot this serves as a good example to show what you can do with just a single lens in terms of different perspectives. And the importance of building sets of pictures instead of single shots. You can go from a general view that sets the scenery (orchids1) to a close-up of just one flower (orchids2) and then to the real macro (orchids3) at the closest distance the 60mm works. You’re already getting into the intimacy of the orchid, but if you’re willing to carry an extra piece of equipment with you, going closer is always an option. In this case I used a 10x diopter lens that I screw in front of the 60mm lens to be able to get a bit closer. Then, the orchid flower is no more a perceptible subject and what you get is something that looks like an alien landscape (orchids4). Going through the four images you’re bound to understand that the closer you get, the less depth of field you have, but the more abstract everything gets.

What I like most about this is that this kind of travel to imaginary worlds can all be done while sitting down at a table, playing for hours with light, colors and shape, to create photography that might not win a competition but that surely fills your souls. And gives you a first person experience of the intimacy of an orchid. Try it at home. With orchids or any other flower.




Images and Article by José Antunes (www.joseantunes.com)