Photographing Nature in Your Backyard

Bird At Flower

The great outdoors is an inexhaustible source of great pictures, yet you don’t need to go hiking into the wilderness to capture fantastic photos. You can start with your garden. The vibrant colors and pleasing shapes of the flowers in your garden often make pictures equally vibrant and pleasing. Apart from flowers, you can also try your neighborhood birds. They, too, are lovely subjects

Picking the Flowers

When photographing flower, or a cluster of flowers, eliminate any background that might compete with its colors. For example, when photographing a bright yellow rose, be sure there are no equally bright colors behind it, such as orange or bright red. This will only distract the viewers’ attention. A good solution to this if you cannot move the distracting background is to place a black cardboard right behind the yellow rose.

Try to get as close to the flower as your camera will allow. Use the close-up mode of your camera. This is usually indicated in the dial as a, well, flower. With this mode, your subject will fill up your viewfinder or LCD screen and display its minute details.

Approach your subject from different angles. Some flowers are better photographed from the top. Others look better when taken at their own levels. If your camera is one of those that have an LCD screen that can be flipped, you may even want to try taking a photo from a low angle. Study your subjects carefully before pressing your shutter.

Lights greatly affect your pictures so use them creatively. Backlighting is a favorite technique of photographers. This simply means allowing light to come from behind a subject. You will need to experiment on the amount of light coming from behind and on its angle but once you find a good balance, you can give the flower a wonderful radiance.

Shooting the Birds

You can attract birds into your garden by constructing a bird feeder. Position it in a way that you get a good background when shooting the birds—with your camera. Be sure to provide a good supply of bird seeds so your guests will keep coming back.

Try to get as close as possible to the birds without scaring them. If you cannot get close enough, use your camera’s zoom to its maximum to capture the image. You can crop the picture later with your photo editing software to come up with a frame-filling photo that gives more impact. Remember to blur the background for even more emphasis on the subject.

If you think just getting out of your house to shoot will scare the birds away, you can still take a picture behind your window. In situations like this, zoom lenses are useful. If you are shooting behind a glass pane, switch your camera to infinity mode, indicated by a symbol of a mountain, so that it will focus on the birds and not the glass.

As with any other picture, lighting is important. When photographing birds, it is best to take them either in the early morning or late afternoon. The soft lights and long shadows help create a dramatic picture.

Even if you are not the outdoor type who goes hiking in the wilderness, you still have ample opportunity to create beautiful nature pictures. All you need to do is look around your house.