Over the last few years, flower photography has been steadily increasing in its popularity and general wedding photography has always been a good money maker for photographers. Due to this, it should come as no surprise that we are constantly seeing people reaching out and asking questions based on “How do you photograph a bouquet of flowers?“.
As the number of people reaching out each month with questions like this is constantly increasing with each passing month, we have decided to publish our dedicated article. Our hope is that our tips and tricks below will be able to help you capture the best possible photographs of bouquets of flowers to ensure you are getting the best image quality possible for your clients.
Although some of our tips and tricks blow may sound like common sense, we have regular readers with all levels of experience when it comes to photography with a large number of people who are beginner photographers reading out content. Due to this, we always try to ensure that our article have tips and tricks for all levels of photographers no matter their experience.
Lighting Is Everything
As with the majority of the popular photography niches, when capturing photographs of bouquets of flowers, the available lighting is going to come into play and have a drastic effect on your image quality. The available lighting for your particular photography session involving the bouquet can vairy wildly, even throughout the course of a single photography session.
Thankfully though, there are a number of tricks available that you can use to your advantage to ensure that you always have optimal lighting to capture the flowers in the bouquet in all their glory. These range from the lighting in the venue, your flash unit, available sunlight, and external light sources such as light sticks.
We would imagine that for the majority of our readers, use a flash unit with their camera when photographing a bouquet, especially at a wedding venue where you will have to move around will be the better option. Although some high end flash units do have some excellent automatic technology these days, we still feel that manually setting your flash settings will be the best option.
Be sure to test and adjust if possible as different lighting conditions in different parts of the venue will need different settings from your camera flash for optimal lighting of the bouquet. If you are lucky enough to have a high end flash unit, you can probably get away with letting it run on auto though.
Zoom In To The Bloom
Although there are an absolute ton of different ways that you are able to capture a photograph of a bouquet of flowers, many photographers seem to forget to zoom in to try capture the bouquet in all its glory. Now, this does not have to be high end macro photography with a decent macro lens, just get in there for one or two photographs for a close up of the actual bouquet.
This is will often be more beneficial for a wedding photography gig rather than a flower photography gig as it can preserve the memory of the brides bouquet for eternity. If other members of the bridal party also have bouquets of flowers then you can often bunch them together for a photograph or two and zoom in to capture the flower arrangement in all of their glory.
Although professional level and a large number of intermediate level photographers are aware of this now, many beginner or entry level photographers often miss this opportunity. Depending on the budget the happy couple had for their wedding, the bouquets may have ended up costing them hundreds of dollars so be sure to get some nice zoomed in photographs.
Pose The Bouquet Of Flowers
This one can be helpful for both general flower photographers as well as wedding photographers although most professionally bouquets for a bride will have already been posed by the florists. It only takes a couple of seconds to pose a bouquet of flowers for an optimal display but depending on the condition of the bouquet, this can drastically improve the quality of the flowers to help get you a much better photograph.
Now, there are a whole bunch of things that you can take into account when posing flowers and rather than go into them in great detail in this article, we will just point you to our guide on how to post plants and flowers. Some things that you can consider is the colour scheme, mixing textures of different flowers and leaves, changing the depth of different plans within the bouquet, and changing the angle of the flowers in the available light.
Again, if you are doing this for a wedding photography gig, be sure to ask the bride if it is ok as she may have specifically asked for her bouquet to have been arranged in that way for a reason. If you have been constructed by a local florists to showcase the bouquet they offer their customers, you may still want to double check with your client if you can pose their flowers before doing so.
Some florists can be extremely proud of their work and become defensive on how they have arranged the bouquet but they will often not take photography into account when doing their arrangement. If you are wanting to pose a bouquet for a florist then explain why you are wanting to do it (usually for better lighting) and you will tend to get a much better response.
Take Extra Care With White Flowers
Although it is not a major issue these days as you can almost always correct any issues with white flowers in the bouquet in post-production, we always recommend that our readers try to get the best possible photograph from the very start. Similar to above though, rather than go into all of our tips and tricks here, we will just link you to our article going over how you are able to photograph white flowers for the best possible image quality.
Check What Your Client Actually Wants
This is another tips that we see so many entry level photographers make no matter what niche they are working in, actually check what your client is wanting from your work. This is a quick and simple tip that can make your job as a photographer so much easier. No matter the reason for photographing a bouquets of flowers, the person that you are capturing the photograph for will almost always have at least a general idea of what they are wanting from the image.
