Dramatically improve your flower photography by adding light from a wireless flash. If you photograph flowers, you can make them stand out by adding light from a wireless flash.

While it is not difficult to photograph flowers, like all outdoor nature photography, we are at the mercy of Mother Nature and that means we don’t always get the light we want. You can solve this problem by using a wireless off-camera flash. It can in many cases dramatically improve your photography.

When I know I am photographing wildflowers I will take my Canon 580EXII and the NPT-04 radio triggers and the Fotodiox mini lightbox to soften the light on flowers. Also, several light stands for multi-flash setups.

My strategy for lighting flowers is I want it to look REAL and not flashed because contrast looks really ugly. I usually use a 100mm macro lens for smaller flowers but today I am using a 28-70mm lens because these flowers are so big. I have set my aperture to f/5.6. and my ISO is 100.

The last thing is when you have a grouping of flowers instead this little mini lightbox won’t cover it. The solution is a larger lightbox like this 18×18 inch one. I am holding the lightbox over the flowers and the additional light brightened up these foreground flowers nicely. On this final photo I darkened the background by changing the shutter speed from 1 second to 1/4 second and that makes the foreground flowers stand out nicely.

At some point a bird walked by and left these imprints on the wet sandy beach. Birds are foragers, always looking for something to eat that will sustain them. I as well am a forager, always searching for something to feed my craving to create. It’s a never ending hunger. Photography sustains me!

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Captured with a Nikon point and shoot and processed in Photoshop and Topaz Adjust. One of the things I do when I look at something like this is to find angles or rotate the camera to create impact to the lines that are in the scene. The footprints were going in one direction so by positioning the camera to make those footprints come from one corner up to the other, more drama is created in the composition.

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