One of the questions I get on a regular basis is how do you photograph flowers when the wind is blowing? Most people seem to want to photograph flowers that are standing still. So they get frustrated on windy days – especially if they only have that one visit to try to photograph some specific flowers.
I have a couple of suggestions for how to photograph flowers when the wind is blowing.
The first is to try to stop the motion by increasing your shutter speed. If you are photographing in Aperture Priority and know what aperture you want to be using, take a photo at that aperture and see what you get for a shutter speed. If it’s not fast enough, an easy way to increase your shutter speed while keeping the same depth of field is to increase your ISO. With digital cameras, ISO can act as a third variable with aperture and shutter speed in getting the correct exposure.
So if you are photographing at f8 at ISO 100 with a shutter speed of 1/100th of a second – and that’s not a fast enough shutter speed to stop the motion of the wind, you can get a faster shutter speed by increasing your ISO. The table below shows you the different shutter speeds you can get by changing your ISO and keeping the same aperture.
As you work with your camera, you’ll discover how high of ISO you can use without encountering problems with digital noise.
If you don’t want to stop the wind, you can always embrace it and show the motion of the flowers in your photo.
One way to do that is use a slower shutter speed. So rather than increasing your ISO – try decreasing your ISO to the lowest one your camera has. Then you can close down my aperture to get a greater depth of field with a slower shutter speed. If you still don’t have a slow enough shutter speed to show the motion you want to capture, try using a polarizer filter or neutral density filter to further slow your shutter speed.
When I saw these Texas Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrush blowing in the wind along the side of the road outside of Austin, Texas, I knew I had to stop. For my first several photos I tried to stop the motion and just wasn’t happy with my images. Then I took a moment to think about what had caught my eye – the colors moving in the wind – and I knew what I had to do! I lowered my ISO to 100 and changed my aperture to F 22 and took a few photos. They were better – but still not what I was looking for. So I pulled out my polarizing filter and put it on the front of my lens. Finally I had what I wanted – a photo that was all about color and wildflowers dancing in the wind.
Texas Wildflowers in the Wind © 2015 Patty Hankins
Another way to embrace the motion is to combine multiple photos of the flowers into one.
I photographed these prickly poppies the same day I photographed the Texas Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrush (it was a really windy day!). I tried using a longer shutter speed with these wildflowers but I just couldn’t get the photo to look the way I wanted it to. So I tried a technique I’d learned in a workshop – taking multiple photos and merging them into one. So I put my camera on my tripod, focused on the flowers, set the my aperture and took about 30 photos when the flowers were moving. Then when I got back to my computer I loaded 10 of the photos into photoshop as separate layers and used my HDR software to merge them. The trick was to turn off the “auto-align” option in the HDR software. So the software just blended the layers rather than trying to align the flowers in the image – and I ended up with a composite photo that showed how the prickly poppies were dancing in the wind.
Prickly Poppies in the Wind © 2015 Patty Hankins
I hope these ideas help you get the photos you want next time you’re out photographing flowers and the wind is blowing.
If you found this information helpful, please join Bill and I for one of our DC Flower Safari Office Hours sessions. For Office Hours, Bill and I invite a small group of people over to our house to answer their questions about photography including how to use your gear, how to edit your photos, and how to photograph in specific situations. Our next office hours are on August 19th. You can learn more about office hours on Meetup at https://www.meetup.com/DC-Area-Flower-Safari/events/241199335/
And if you liked my wildflower in the wind photos – both are available for sale. You can see both of them along with other Texas wildflowers on my website at http://beautifulflowerpictures.com/store/texas/