Bluebird Chic ambassador Monika Hanley of Internationelle shares her best tips for capturing the beauty of Spring in your photographs.
Spring is such a great time to get outside and renew your spirit with the rebirth of all the flowers and trees you’ve been missing all winter. The wonderful, yet challenging thing about spring photography, in particular, is all the colors! So much is coming back to life and it’s hard to know what to start capturing first.
Here are a few quick tips to make sure that, no matter what your spring subject, your photos capture the vibrant beauty of the season.
TIP # 1 – WATCH YOUR WHITE BALANCE
The most important thing to remember is white balance. When shooting in spring light conditions, make sure that the colors you see with your eye match what you see in your camera. Spring light has a tendency to give photos an orange tint.
TIP # 2 – ADJUST YOUR EXPOSURE
Underexposure, especially when shooting into beautiful spring sunshine, can be an issue. Adjusting your exposure +1/+2 to compensate can go a long way toward not making your subjects look too shaded.
Tip #3 – USE A POLARIZING FILTER
If you love capturing flowers and blossoms as much as I do, using a polarizer or polarizing filter can make the vibrant colors of foliage and blooms stand out, especially when it comes to green grass or blue sky.
TIP #4 – EXPERIMENT WITH DIFFERENT LIGHTING
If you’re worried about lighting, try shooting on a cloudy day, which makes it a bit easier to avoid glaring bright spots and deep shadows. Luckily, early spring can be full of surprise weather moments, so you might have bright sunshine, dark clouds, and rain all at the same time!
For even more interesting perspective, head out early in the morning, at first light, to capture both the morning dew and the morning magic hour, shortly after sunrise.
TIP # 5 – GET CLOSE
Spring is so bright, colorful, and full of dynamic changes to the environment that, if not careful, it’s easy to have very cluttered looking photos when you’re trying to take it all in. I find that getting low to the ground, right on the level of the flowers and isolating one or two can make a photo go from overwhelming and busy, to delicate and poignant. A shallow depth of field helps blur the background and bring the flower forward, so try using a wide aperture of f/4 or f/2.8.
Look for small details to make your photos stand out from simple generic flower images. Less is more! If you want a fun experiment, invest in a macro lens or macro extension tube and get really close to the life on the ground. Pollen, bees, ants… so much life is milling around in early spring!
TIP # 6 – LOOK FOR INTERESTING ANGLES AND PATTERNS
With so much going on, it’s hard to zoom in on one particular feature. Consider your subject from all angles, before shooting.
From above, below, through the grass, can all create unique and memorable images versus a standard straight-on shot. Leaf patterns, petals, the one pink flower in a field of white ones, the lines and stripes within flowers all make for fascinating spring subjects.
Above all, the best way to start photographing spring is to grab your camera and head outside, rain or shine!
Founded by two travelers on a mission to both visit every country in the world and fight human trafficking on the way, Internationelle is a reminder that travel is about the drive in all of us to seek new things, places, and people; to make memories worth their weight in gold/food/sunsets; and to focus not only on what the world can bring to us, but what we can also bring to the world. Join us!
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