The Green Geek: How to take digital photos of your plants
Q:
Is there a secret to taking good-quality digital photographs of plants? I recently purchased a digital camera, but most of my plant photos look out of focus, blurred or have glare-spots on them. What am I doing wrong?
Sincerely,
Snappy Gardener
A:
Dear Snappy,
While I am not an expert photographer, I have a run into the very same challenges you are facing when taking digital photographs of plants. Most of these challenges are easy to overcome once you realize what’s happening with your camera.
The first challenge to overcome is focus. Almost every digital camera comes with powerful autofocus features that makes holiday snaps dead easy. A few also have a ‘macro’ focus feature that sets the camera up to take pictures of objects that are close to the lens.
Unfortunately, standard autofocus settings are next to useless when taking pictures of plants. Even ‘macro ‘ focus settings only work well for objects 30cm away from the camera lens. To make matters worse, a digital camera’s autofocus features work by examining the image in the viewfinder and calculating which areas dominate. While this works well for pictures of people, the structure of plants – with their stems, leaves and flowers scattered at wide range of focal points – confuses many digital camera’s autofocus features. This is why you will often find you have photos of a plant’s leaves in stark detail, while the bloom is out of focus!
Put simply, most digital cameras do an appalling job of focusing on plants.
For this reason, when selecting a digital camera for use in the nursery, make sure it allows you to fine-tune the focus. Ideally, you should be able to turn off the autofocus feature entirely and manually focus in on your plants. If you cannot turn off the camera’s autofocus, then read your camera’s manual and find out how you can select the “focus position” (or focal point,) of the camera. Usually, this is done by selecting a spot (or zone) on the viewfinder to limit the information the camera will use when calculating the focus; whatever is in the zone will be in focus.
The next challenge to overcome is lighting. One of the common mistakes when photographing plants is to use the built in flash of the digital camera. This will result in either over-saturated lighting or a huge blur on the image. The reason for this is that the flash is far too close to the plant and also at the wrong angle.
If your digital camera has an automatic flash function, turn it off before snapping plants. Try to photograph your plants in mid-morning or late afternoon sunlight, with the light coming in from above and behind you. Beware of your own shadows!
Another option is to build a mini photo-studio, suitable for shooting potted plants and flowers. This can be accomplished by using a white sheet pinned against a wall and three desk two lamps fitted with ‘true colour daylight balanced’ florescent bulbs. You need to setup the lighting in such a way to diffuse the light evenly over your subject.
The final challenge to overcome is stability. Because taking photographs of plants happens up close, even the tiniest movement creates a blurring effect and throws off your camera’s focus. Just the act of pressing the shutter button is enough to mess up the most beautifully setup shot.
The easiest way to solve this problem is to invest in a camera tripod. Ensure that you get one with a pivoting head (both up and down and rotational) so you can set your camera to point down (or up) at your plant subjects. The tripod’s legs should also be independently adjustable, so that you can set the camera on uneven ground.
With these tips, you should be able to starting improving the quality of your plant images. Good luck!