If you feel like it’s hard to get started, or that there’s nothing interesting to photograph in your yard, this article is for you.
Photographer Karen Quist uses her Canon 5D Mark III with a Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro lens for her nature photography but you don’t necessarily need a special macro lens at all. Did you know you can use your ordinary lens for macro photography? You can try free-lensing or get a cheap reverse lens ring, check out this article to learn more. However, nature photography is much more than just shooting macro, here are some great ideas you can start working on immediately.
After the rain
Raindrops are fascinating through the lens. Try photographing them from various angles, and in different lighting. When photographing a single droplet, or a string of them, isolate them by keeping the background uncluttered. You can do this by creating distance between the droplets and the background, and using a wide aperture to ensure it is blurred. Notice also how water sits in nice round droplets on some types of leaves, but on others it disperses.
Look up… Look down
If you are lucky enough to have trees in your garden, try standing or lying directly underneath them and shooting up into the branches. Notice how the light changes from early morning, throughout the day into late afternoon and evening. Branches, whether they are naked or covered with leaves, contrast beautifully against a blue sky. They are equally stunning at sunrise and sunset, and on a moonlit night.
If you haven’t any trees, look for interesting cloud formations to photograph. You can create a collection of skies to use as Photoshop overlays, to add interest to other outdoor photos such as portraits. Look for vertical cloud formations, fat white fluffy ones, and those lovely soft colours around the edge of the clouds at dusk and dawn.
Down on the ground are a million microcosms in the moss, the lawn, between the paving stones, and the fallen bark and leaves. You won’t see them until you get down to ground level, so lie flat on your tummy and peer into another world.
Experiment with sun flare and haze
Your backyard is one of the best places to experiment with effects and new techniques. Firstly, you become familiar with how things look at various times of the day, and throughout the seasons. Secondly, you don’t need to travel far, so you can respond to anything on a whim. If you spot something amazing while you’re sipping on your morning coffee, you needn’t even get out of your pyjamas to capture it!
Portraits in nature
Nature provides us with the perfect canvas for portraiture. Look for a bank of flowers, a bed of autumn leaves, or just a green hedge – the colours in nature never seem to clash.
Mushrooms, toadstools and fungi
These are abundant in autumn and winter, but some species pop up throughout the year after rain. Look in damp, mossy places, on the sides of trees and log piles for them.
My personal favourites are the red toadstools with white speckles. They are evocative of fairy tales and magic, and their colours are a nature photographer’s dream!
Flowers and leaves
Flowers and leaves are often the first things that come to mind when we look for subjects in our own backyards. They offer an endless variety of colours, shapes and textures for you to photograph. You could create a collection based on a single colour scheme, or try to find as many different leaf or flower shapes as possible.
Experiment with different lighting and conditions. I love backlighting for leaves and flowers, as it creates a luminous, almost three-dimensional effect, and you can see details such as veins. Some shapes look better with strong, directional light, and I love how colours are enhanced in the wet.
Read the full article with even more tips over at Digital Photography School.
Source: Digital Photography School
