phoenix | 
May 20th, 2003Just a bunch of floral photos that I’ve taken over the past month or so.
Not sure what this one is but it’s the first blossom of the house.
African Violet. Yet another plant at home.
How interesting, a pond within well what looks like a flower.
The following was shot in an orchid show.
This is probably one of the best out of the show.
Tags: 
Categories:
What should be the camera settings for taking flower photographs like WB, Saturation, Metering, sharpness, vividness etc. Since I am a novice in
the field, it would help me a lot. I own Nikon D7000 + 105mm f/2.8 micro lens.
Also please tell if the polariser filter is necessary.
Thanks.
Well there’s no one good setting that will work in all situations. That’s why they are settings so you can change based on the environment you are shooting in and the subject that you are shooting. In general, for floral photos, I do custom white balances because flowers are not moving. So I can take a shot of my gray card (or just a white card works okay too) in the shooting light and set the custom white balance. This produces the best result. For saturation, sharpness, vividness, I always set them to the lowest possible. Most of these are post processing on the image taken, I personally would rather like to adjust them on my computer later than have the camera do all the processing. Naturally for that I shot RAW all the time and adjust those parameters using the camera’s software later. Metering, again this is floral photos, and they are not moving. So I tend to use full manual settings for exposure and use spot meter just to get a few samples of measurement on the dark places and on the bright places. I will then make adjustments manually so that with my exposure, the subject is not exceeding the dynamic range – basically no highlights are over blown and no shadows are too dark.
For floral photos, I didn’t find too much use of a polarizer. I have used it in occasion when I did not bring a neutral density filter and yet I really need to cut down the light so I can use a much slower shutter speed. polarizer does cut down the light by 1-1.5 stops. But it also produces some shifted colors with a polarizer while a neutral density (ND) filter doesn’t. But polarizer is great if you are taking landscape photos and needs to cut down the glare from the sun.
Thanks a lot for the advice and expert guidance.
VP Singh