FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Hi,
I have a few techniques I use when photographing my plants, here is a few of them:
- Make sure that your camera focuses on the best part of the plant, sometimes it will focus on the potting mix instead.
- Taking the photo from the best angle. experiment with a few photos to try and get the best shot of your plant/s.
- If you are taking a photo looking horizontally at the plant, e.g to show the length of a stem/ leaves, it may help to put a peice of card just behind the plants, this prevents the camera from focusing on the background, and it also blocks out background light which can make your plant stem/leaves seem thinner than they actually are. but, make sure that the source of light coming from behind you is still bright enough to produce a good photo.
- I always take my pictures in full daylight, never with a flash.
Please comment any other tips to improve this list!
Thanks,
Ollie

Use your camera and experiment with the different settings. Sometimes the "wrong" setting might work even better.

lemonlily wrote:Use your camera and experiment with the different settings. Sometimes the "wrong" setting might work even better.

Thanks, thats a good tip, I normally use a CLOSE UP setting, but sometimes its best if I use the AUTO setting.

thanks for the info, ill try it!!

Your welcome. I figured that out by using some other setting, but the pictures weren't too bad. But in general, I don't really know how to set the camera, so all I do is walk forward, backward, zoom in, zoom out, move up, move down, that kind of stuff.

Here is a link on how to make a macro-studio.
http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/07/ho ... tudio.html
It's basically a cardboard box that has a large hole cut into each side. Over these holes, he has placed tissue paper. A piece of poster board is then placed in an arc, covering the floor and the back of the box. This gives a nice smooth transition. You could use different colors of poster board for different looks. He is using lights in this set-up, but you could use this outdoors just as easily. The main thing to remember is to diffuse your light.

archimago wrote:Here is a link on how to make a macro-studio.
http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/07/ho ... tudio.html
It's basically a cardboard box that has a large hole cut into each side. Over these holes, he has placed tissue paper. A piece of poster board is then placed in an arc, covering the floor and the back of the box. This gives a nice smooth transition. You could use different colors of poster board for different looks. He is using lights in this set-up, but you could use this outdoors just as easily. The main thing to remember is to diffuse your light.

Very cool! I might have to make me one of these!

Funky