SECRETS REVEALED: Wildflower Photography Mastery

I have been a nature photographer for quite a few years, and I love capturing the beauty of nature through wildflowers. But if you're going to try this, there's a few tips that you must know to get the best out of your images. So today I'm going to share with you my top tips for getting the most out of your wildflower photography. First up is your bonus tip. Not all Wildflowers are wild. Some are tame. Alright, let's get out there and let's go shoot. Alright, so first up, in order to get amazing wildlife photos, you're gonna need to step out of your comfort zone. You're gonna need to get into one of the manual modes and Either manual, shutter priority, or aperture priority. So if you want to make sure that your flower is frozen and it's not blurred, you're gonna want to put your shutter at at least 1/250th of a second, especially here in this wind. So today I'll be shooting a minimum of 1/250th of a second. And then my f-stop, if I was shooting in shutter priority, I would let the camera choose my shutter and my ISO. And then if you want to choose your aperture, which is your f-stop, you would put it on A for aperture priority, and then you would set your aperture. For your depth of field that you want, whether it is— let me show you here. I got a lens that will actually open up and show you. So this is f/22 and that is f/2.8. So f/2.8 is the widest, so it lets in the most light, and f/22 Lets in the least amount of light, and also f/22 also gives you the greater depth of field, so more of your flower will be in focus. f/2.8, it does let in a lot of light, but you will be limited on your depth of field. It'll be very shallow, especially if you're shooting with a macro lens. Okay, So now that you're going to step out of your comfort zone, let's go ahead and hop out of the truck. And first thing we're going to do is we're going to check our surroundings. That is tip number 1. Always, always, always check your surroundings because wildflower photography is a roadside Attraction, and typically it is on busy roads, so you always want to make sure that you are completely safe and off the road if you pull off. Um, I like to find me fields of bluebonnets that are in neighborhoods or on less traveled roads, but a lot of times, like, your, your cows and your donkeys And in Texas, your zebras and camels will all be on pretty major highways. Um, not really highways, I guess here they're called farm-to-market roads. The other part of check your surroundings is to always make sure you check for snakes, because rattlesnakes really like to live in bluebonnets, and along with other snakes too, but I can tell you, if one is crawling on you, you're not going to wait any time to figure out what kind of snake it is. You're just gonna get the heck out of the way. At least I would. And then you also want to make sure you don't have any fire ants because fire ants will eat the heck out of your legs and it burns forever. All right, so let's jump out of the truck, go check our surroundings, and let's get busy. All right, so we're out. We got a nice field of bluebonnets here. And I'm gonna find me a good spot to get set up. Basically, I'm shopping for a flower. So here we go. Here's a nice little patch right here. So before I get Bailey out of the truck to do some portraits of her, I'm going to check and make sure there's No critters. Okay, so when you're out taking photographs of flowers, one thing you want to keep in mind is your composition. So you don't want to set up and have this as your view. Even though it's beautiful, you've got a pole right there in your way. That would be a cluttered background. One way to alleviate that is to just zoom in on a specific flower and photograph it. So let's try a couple compositions here. So notice on this one you can still see the background right behind the bluebonnet. So let's go ahead and jump on over to the 70-200 now. Today we are shooting with the Sony A9 III and the Sony 70-200mm f/4. It is also a macro lens. So let's go ahead and get set up here. So on this shot, I want to be at f/4. Because I have a lot of stuff in the background and I really want to blur them out, and I'm thinking that 1/400th of a second is probably gonna be pretty good. So I've got these pretty little yellow cups here, right here Mm-hmm. I'm not sure what they are, but I'm gonna look them up when I get home. They're absolutely gorgeous. All right, so, okay, so that was at f/4. So now I'm gonna take a shot at f/8. And I'll show you the difference. Just notice here how the 70-200 did a fabulous job of separating the background at f/4, and this is the Indian mallow, and here's the bluebonnets at f/8. Not as good isolation. Let's go get— let's go get the tripod and the wide-angle lens now. Another thing when you're out doing wildflowers, you want to be careful not to trample them. Try to take the same paths that other people have taken to help preserve them, because if we don't preserve them, they may not come back next year. Okay, so I am set up here. Got the tripod set up. Got my patch of bluebonnets and I got the bay right behind it. All right, let's shoot this, see what we get. I love everything about this photo. Everything is exceptionally sharp. It's just an amazing shot with the clouds and everything. So we're setting Bailey up for a shot and here is the shot that I'm going for. Let's do this. So here's Bailey at f/8. She turned out exceptionally sharp, and I really like how the clouds turned out in this one as well. You want to get low for sure. You want to get down into the flowers world. You want to find you a good specimen that doesn't have A lot of dead stuff on it. Which this field, I'm having a really hard time finding something because it is really, really almost past its prime. I need to drive a little more north to get some really good shots. All right, so I think I've had enough of this little patch of bluebonnets. Let's head on over to another amazing spot, which is a cemetery. All right, let's go. All right, so here we are at the cemetery. This cemetery is also maybe a little bit past its prime, but we still got some Nice flowers that we can find to photograph. The one bad thing about cemeteries is trying to find a place to park, so I'm going to wait until the one spot in this cemetery is open, and then I'm going to buzz on over there and park. When you're out photographing wildflowers, you need to take into consideration when you're taking photos Number one, the background. You want a background that is not busy, and usually try to get colors of other flowers that make your flowers stand out. So like a bluebonnet, for example, would stand out up against yellow flowers, and a yellow flower would really stand out up against a bunch of white flowers. And you just want to make sure that you don't have a bunch of sticks and weeds and stuff in your photo. What I'll usually do is I'll go in front of the flower that I want to photograph and I'll pull the weeds out just so I have a better composition of my flower. So I think the one parking spot that we have out here at the Cemetery is now available. So I'm gonna whip over here and park, and I'm gonna photograph a couple examples of some bluebonnets with some pretty backgrounds. Um, hopefully the yellow flowers I can get, cuz we have a lot of yellow flowers out here this year. All right, let's go for it. Here at the cemetery I'm gonna take out the 70-200 since it's also a macro lens and I should be able to get some pretty cool stuff with it. So let's go, let's go do this. So here's a really nice picture of some bluebonnets. And this one here got a nice background. And this one, I just love the background on this one. The yellowish green. The cross— I always got to take pictures of crosses for my friend Shawna at Gypsy Finn of Texas. Go check her out. All right, so don't run off quite yet. We got a couple more things to go over. All right, so what we're going to go over is we're just going to brush on a few of the tips. A couple of them I did leave out while I was out there. Uh, the one that I left out while I was out photographing is to be mindful of no trespassing signs. And also in Texas, if there is purple on the posts, that means that no trespassing. So just be respectful of that. And if you want to photograph the flowers, just make sure you take it from the public side of the fence. Don't trespass. I always like to in Rule number 3, or not rule but tip, to always check your surroundings because it's a roadside attraction and it is very dangerous, especially on the highways and county roads and farm-to-market roads. And I also want to enforce not to trample the flowers so that you can leave them beautiful for the next people and for the years to come, because if they don't go to seed They will not bloom again next year. Here are your tips. You can screen snapshot this, take it out with you into the field, and don't forget, last tip, go out, shoot, and have fun. Life is too short to stay inside, so get out and enjoy it. Don't forget to watch this video on editing so you can learn how to make the most out of your images And create images as you imagined. So don't forget to like and subscribe and ring my bell, do all that good stuff, and I'll see you next time. Bye.