Hello and welcome to Inspired, a weekly email for my paid subscribers. In this series I want to explore topics which I hope might spark some inspiration for your own photography. I will talk about my thought process for creating images, both in the field and in post processing. The posts will be linked in some way to the monthly challenges, hopefully giving you all lots of food for thought.
This week I have been working with floral landscapes thinking about how to portray them in different ways. I love a good sunrise (even at this time of year!) and I really feel that the soft light of dawn conveys the feeling of spring better than the more contrasty light at sunset.
However, many of us can’t aways get out at the beginning or end of the day, so when golden hour photography isn’t possible how can we make our floral landscapes look and feel a bit more interesting?
In these situations I tend to resort to shooting with a long lens using a shallow depth of field. My aim is to try and convey a feeling rather than show all of my scene in perfect detail.
In the image below I have used a 100-400mm lens and an aperture of F5.6 at 400mm to create a blurred frame around my landscape. Even though the sky was laden with grey clouds I have created a sunny feeling to this shot by using a clump of euphorbia as an out of focus frame to the bottom of the image.
For this scene I have chosen to make the coastguard cottages the focus of my image, rendering them sharp while leaving the foreground flowers blurred. The long focal length has compressed the scene and eliminated most of my mid ground, bringing the flowers and the buildings closer together.
In the next image I have reversed the process and have focused on the mid ground. This has created a band of sharp flowers in the middle of the shot sandwiched between a blurred foreground and background.
While the cottages are fairly indistinct I think they still give the image some context and I really like the abstract pattern of colours in the foreground. The next image uses a similar technique but this time I have chosen to focus on the building and leave the flowers in the foreground to create an abstract pattern of colour which I feel is quite painterly.
I often feel this technique works best when the mid ground is visible and there is an obvious progression of focus through the frame.
In the following shot I have used the flowers as a blurred frame in the foreground and have focused on the boat. However the flowers closest to the boat are also in focus and I feel this adds some lovely depth to the image.
I have also used sharp flowers to create a frame for some out of focus details. This might seem the wrong way of doing things but I like the fact that the signs in this image are blurred enough to not be the main focus, but are still legible and add some lovely context to the composition.
I hope these images have given you a few ideas for what is possible with a longer focal length and a shallow depth of field. Floral landscapes don’t always need to be sharp from front to back and I feel that selective focus can really add mood to a composition when other elements may be missing.
If you feel inspired to create some of your own selective focus flower landscapes then please share them to the chat.
Thank you again for taking out a paid subscription and please chat or comment to get the most out of it.
Gill
Beautiful photographs and an interesting accompanying essay. Lots to ponder on, thank you.