Seedfork said: @Vinity,
Your photos always look great. Can you give up any photo tips and what type of equipment you are using to get that perfect exposure every time?
Thank you. I am lucky my sister is a professional photographer so I get her cast off equipment. She went to canon mirrorless so I got her cannon 90d {I didn't want to 50d, it's fancier but heavier and honestly, beyond me} and she's either bought me lenses or given me her L lenses. My back up she got me for my birthday is a 70d years ago. The 90d has more pixels. Pixel count in cameras is actually going down now in cameras. I always shoot in raw, and process in camera raw and save as jpeg, in raw format you have significantly more color info to work from. I can correct for exposure in case I got it wrong, color balance, tint, sharpness, contrast and white balance super easy. ANd it has a handy auto fix which is what I hit first. It will correct about 80% of my mess up. People seem to think something straight out of the camera is somehow more honest, this is not so, cameras {especially phone cameras} are generally now all made to slant toward making skin tones look pretty, for selfies and portraits. So you aren't always seeing what you eye really sees in the garden. Look for a processing program often built into even cheaper cameras that look for white balance, you can filter for what kind of light you have taken the shot in, shade, full sun, cloudy, tungsten, incandescent, or florescent. This will correct for a lot of color issues.
Ok, after that, generally over cast is the best flat light to get colors, {after adjusted for type of light if you can} take pics as early as you can, freshest color will be in the first hour or two after opening. I literally am out just as the sun is still behind the tree line, for me, 6am to 7am during prime season. Best blues are when it's still a little chilly at night and on a relatively new scape I generally find early booms have better color than final blooms. Make sure they are watered properly. I use just a pinch of epsom salt to intensify colors, especially blue tones, on top of my usual fertilizers. Take a LOT of photos, I take at least an hour a day for 5 weeks during the season. 100s of shots a day, most get thrown out. I use a 128 gig card and go thru 2 a season on the main camera.
Use the longest lens you have and zoom in and if it's a single bloom, a fairly narrow depth of field {f-stop=aperture}this will make the background go blurry and highlight the bloom. I generally find perfect focus needs to be on the anthers, it doesn't seem to matter if edges of the sepals or petals are a little bit softer focus, it drives me crazy when the anthers are out of focus. If you want a absolutely sharp entire flower, increase the f-stop/aperture, but realize the background will be in shaper focus too. I usually like my 70-200mm zoom and I like to shoot an fstop 5.6 for a single bloom, I adjust the iso and shutter speed accordingly but you can set those as automatic. Usually I'm shooting at 400 iso in early morning with a f-stop of 5.6 I can have a shutter speed of anywhere from 80 to 1200. A balance between iso and f-stop/aperture is best, if the shutter is getting higher than 800-1000, if I think about it I'll drop the iso to 200. I can not hand hold a sharp shot at less than a shutter speed of 80 also taking into account wind blowing. If you can't get at least an 80 shutter speed, kick up the iso but remember you will get more noise, teeny little black grey dots when you blow it up very large, but that isn't generally that important unless you are blowing a pic up larger. For web size shots, it's ok to kick it up. You are giving up a bit of color info.
For clump shots I will generally go to the wide angle 30-70mm lens or zoom out with the 70-200mm lens. It's harder to get a good enough compression to get a blurry background when you are trying for a clump shot {I'm still working on that}, depending on how far apart the flowers are. Clump shots I generally go for at 9. to 10. f-stop/aperture, higher f-stop number the less light into the lens so I try and balance the iso and the shutter speed, keeping the shutter speed where I can still hand hold, above 80 and the iso low as I can. For a whole bed shot, I definitely go for the 30-70 mm wide angle lens, use a tripod, cause you are going to be shooting at a really high f stop, like 16. which means a lot of feet of perfect focus {depth of field}, but it also means, even using a higher iso, your shutter speed will be crap. Plus, any camera shake will really show in blurry flowers. It helps to go for full garden shots on an overcast day, no wind and a little later say 10am or later so you still have flat light, but ok color on the blooms and it's not so dark as 6 or 7am morning.
My sister trained me on working border collies working sheep, they are moving fast, you are never sure what direction, and we like a close up shot with a blurry background with the eye in perfect focus, HARD to do and the dogs are generally mostly black and white with usually white sheep so exposure is difficult. It's insanely hard. The daylilies had a learning curve and I'm still working it but they are easier than taking pics of the dogs LOL
Sorry you asked? LOL That's my ted talk on photographing daylilies.
Here's a pic of some spring lamb butts, they keep me company in the daylily beds cause there is usually tasty weeds thrown over the fence
