Photographing flowers on sunny days

GardenersHelper

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Nick
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I have often seen comments like this - "Direct sunlight can be harsh and unforgiving, resulting in images with too much contrast, burnt-out highlights and loss of detail in shadow areas". (Quoted from 25 flower photography tips for beginners). On that page there are recommendations for using sunlight reflectors and diffusers/softboxes, using flash to soften shadows or taking subjects indoors. This can be taken further, as in for example - "When people catch me indoors on a sunny day, they ask me, "Why aren't you outside taking pictures?" Truth is, when the weather man predicts the sun will come out, my camera usually stays in." (Quoted from Flower Photography, Seven tips for flowers, people, travel and scenic photos.) To be fair to the author, despite her "usually stays in" comment she does then go on to mention diffusers and reflectors, and shooting into the sun to get nice backlit effects.

I have no quarrel with any of this - after all, from time to time I use diffusers, reflectors and flash in my flower photography. However, what neither of these authors mentions, and what in my experience seems rarely to be mentioned, is that shooting on sunny days, with the sun directly illuminating the subject, or the background, or both, gives opportunities that are simply not available on overcast days with even light, or with light evened out by diffusion, reflection or flash, Some of these opportunities may be quite taxing, in terms of shooting and/or processing, and may need some practice to get the hang of, but as with using small apertures or using (or not using) a tripod or using (or not using) flash, I wouldn't want people to miss out on what can be some excellent opportunities because they have been told some technique or shooting environment isn't worth bothering with. I think almost anything is worth trying and making your own mind up about. One of the delights of this forum for me is to keep learning just how varied are people's perceptions, visual preferences, subject matter, kit and techniques.

So, FWIW, here are some images of flowers captured on a sunny day in May and a sunny day in June last year (images that I have only just processed). The sun was shining variously on the subjects, their immediate surroundings and/or the backgrounds. All are natural light (i.e. no flash), with no diffusers or reflectors used. They were all captured as raw with my 70D and 55-250 STM. Some may have used the Canon 500D close-up lens, the rest using the bare lens. They were probably all hand-held.

Processing was (batch processing) in DXO Optics Pro 10 and (image-specific processing) in Lightroom.

Because of a bug in Lightroom the Exif data is missing from these JPEGs, so I've listed the exposure data for each image. Some of the combinations of aperture, shutter speed and ISO are obviously suboptimal, but when I'm changing aperture a lot from shot to shot while concentrating hard on composition (and especially if the light level keeps changing because of cloud movements) the shutter speed and ISO combination sometimes wanders off into la la land. More informative perhaps is the Exposure Compensation, which I've also noted. You will see that all but one are, according to the camera's metering, underexposed, by over two stops in one case. This is because I'm very conscious of how easy it is to blow highlights for these sorts of shots, and I dial down the exposure as far as necessary to avoid the appearance of blown highlights on the LCD (I use live view the whole time). There is a judgement call in this, and I do overdo it sometimes, but I'd rather be trying to bring up an overly dark image in post processing than throwing one away because it has blown highlights which I can't retrieve or hide.

The posted images are taken from this Flickr album and this Flickr album. As usual there are 1300 pixel high versions over at Flickr.

1 ISO 100, f/8, 1/120 sec, EC +1

0807 05 2015_04_09 IMG_6077_DxO_MC15 LR 1300h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


2 ISO 100, f/10, 1/40 sec, EC - 0.3

0807 06 2015_04_09 IMG_6107_DxO_MC15 LR 1300h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


3 ISO 640, f/25, 1/160 sec, EC -2.3

0807 27 2015_04_09 IMG_6288_DxO_MC15 LR 1300h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


4 ISO 640, f/22, 1/250 sec, EC -1.3

0807 26 2015_04_09 IMG_6268_DxO_MC15 LR 1300h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


5 ISO 1000, f/14, 1/640, EC -1

0807 30 2015_04_09 IMG_6317_DxO_MC15 LR 1300h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


6 ISO 1250, f/10, 1/125, EC -1

0807 31 2015_04_09 IMG_6343_DxO_MC15 LR 1300h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


7 ISO 320, f/25, 1/160, EC -1

0807 29 2015_04_09 IMG_6190_DxO_MC15 LR 1300h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


8 ISO 400, f/13, 1/640, EC -0.6

0805 21 2015_05_13 IMG_2151_DxOPrime LR 1300h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr



Continued in next post ...
 
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9 ISO 800, f/13, 1/640 sec, EC -0.3

0805 01 2015_05_13 IMG_2109_DxOPrime LR 1300h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

10 ISO 400, f/13, 1/250 sec, EC -0.3

0805 03 2015_05_13 IMG_2115_DxOPrime LR 1300h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

11 ISO 100, f/4.5, 1/200 sec, EC -0.6

0805 13 2015_05_13 IMG_2134_DxOPrime LR 1300h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

12 ISO 400, f/4.5, 1/5000 sec, EC -0.3

0805 11 2015_05_13 IMG_2129_DxOPrime LR 1300h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

13 ISO 100, f/4.5, 1/2000 sec, EC -0.6

0805 12 2015_05_13 IMG_2132_DxOPrime LR 1300h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

14 ISO 1000, f/5.6, 1/2000 sec, EC -1

0807 34 2015_04_09 IMG_6357_DxO_MC15 LR 1300h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

15 ISO 1000, f/16, 1/160, EC -0.3

0807 35 2015_04_09 IMG_6360_DxO_MC15 LR 1300h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

16 ISO 1000, f/13, 1/500, EC -0.3

0807 36 2015_04_09 IMG_6363_DxO_MC15 LR 1300h
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
 
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