Simple Photography Tips - how to take great spring flower photographs - catkins

Five free simple photography tips on photographing spring flowers with your phone camera or camera

• The best opportunities are short lived

• Focus when doing macro is critical

• If with a camera, use your aperture for best depth of field

• Beware, as ever, of the background

• Use macro if you have it

So let's talk some simple photographic tips for spring flowers - Catkins

Some days it's just foul wet and windy and who would want to be out! But some of you will be, walking with the dog, trying to passify a wingeing child. Keep your eyes peeled, and you may even find suitable things to take pictures of.

Other days are so exciting, maybe the Sun shining, maybe not, but the birds are singing and there are spring flowers, and the world feels ok, and so does the light.

You'll spot the catkins, those harbingers of spring, that have hung unopened for weeks. Like many flowers it's quite challenging to know the best way of photographing them, and in the spring very often the background, is quite uninspiring, no leaves on the trees. I like to get in close and see the real details, the beauty of creation. Let's have a look at some now.

In this article we can look at the catkins that come from the haze, there are othersl. I'm just recovering from a replacement hip operation so climbing up to a bush would be quite a challenge so I was very thrilled to find that there was a small bunch of catkins in a vase on the windowsill.

I don't know if you've ever spotted them but the male part of the flower is small and red and of course, the female part is the catkin which we’re familiar.

Image One. Catkin - male flower, with vase in background

If you look at the first image, you'll see that it's quite a nice picture but there's a lot of background which has nothing to do with the thing that we photographing, and can't masquerade as a wild image. It's ok if you don't mind the vase!

Image Two. Catkin - male flower

It took me several shots to get an image where the red parts of the male flower are in focus and if you look at image two you can see this.

 I quite like the way in which the catkins are out of focus in the background giving a wholeness to the picture.

Image Three- Catkins, male flower out of focus

In the third picture you'll see that I've pulled back a little bit, to get more of the foreground catkins in focus but I do feel that the picture has been somewhat spoilt as the red has fropped out of focus. If this was a traditional camera, you could possibly get round this by setting your aperture to the biggest number it will go to.

Moving the camera lens around to get rid of background and foreground distractions is a simple but important way to get the best photograph. If we look at the bottom picture what we've managed to do there is to focus on the red flower but to keep quite a lot of catkins, in the picture as well.

Image Four - Catkins and male flower in focus

Another simple photography tip is that if you do want to photograph the whole bush, or group of bushes, there is a period when the catkins are dropping their pollen, and they take on a lovely gentle yellow colour. This is also the time when the male flowers come out. Sort of the mating time as it were. So get outside locate your bushes and keep an eye out for the right time.