Photographing Flowers, Part 4: Breaking Your Mold

Flowering Tree at Brookside

Now that we've looked at the needed equipment and strategies for composition and lighting to develop your own style for flower photography, I'd like to consider the need to break the mold you set, at least on occasion. When I lived in MD, I used to go to Brookside Gardens [gallery] every Saturday morning.  I love that place--I suspect it's the best free place to photograph flowers in the state.  One day I was looking through my photos from Brookside, and it hit me that all my photos were taken at 180mm (the focal length of my macro lens), and almost all of these were closeups of flowers.  I was in a flower photography rut, and I didn't even know it.  Breaking that mold was hard, and in fact I'm not sure I ever did.  In some ways I guess I decided I liked my rut and I was sticking to it.

Daffodils

But I also realized that on occasion I need to try something different--I needed at least some variety in my approach to flowers.  As you develop your own style of photography, it's easy to continue doing the same thing that works over and over again.  Of course, there's nothing wrong with that.  But it's good to expand your sense of photographic style as well.  I suspect it will keep you interested in your subject matter longer.  So here are my attempts at breaking my own mold at Brookside Gardens.  Hope you enjoy them.

Flowers at Brookside

Flowers at Brookside

IR Photo of Monument for those Killed by the D.C. Sniper
(words legible if you click on photo):
Linger here on those lost to violence
Hope for a more peaceful world
Seek a reverence for life among all people

Brookside being Patriotic