Photography was a budding passion of mine when the girls were babies. Graham had gotten me my first DSLR camera that I would snap shots of the girls in fall amongst the yellowing aspens, family vacations in the redwoods or on the Oregon coast, a couple of years before ever sowing my first seed as a flower farmer. I enjoyed encapsulating the special and ordinary moments alike, as I am sure most of you have.

Once we started Sierra Flower Farm, I loved incorporating my love for photography with my new passion for flowers. Before I had any flowers blooming in the garden bed, I was building my website and creating social media accounts, but I didn’t have many photos of the flowers. So, I used what I had—closeup photos of German chamomile, zinnias, and a single stem of sweet pea.

From the beginning, I wanted to only show and represent my flower farm’s products that were our own. Now, these photos were not many, nor incredible, but they were aunthentic and genuine of where we were at durring that step of our flower farming journey. During the late winter months, I photographed seeds and seedlings germinating. As we planted the crops, I photographed each phase. When the plants came into bloom, I photographed that. By the end of the season, I had quite a collection of photos.

After the first couple of seasons of flower farming, Graham circled back to his passion for videography, and photography which has allowed me to get in front of the camera to be the face of my business. Throughout the growing season, our “date nights” have become me holding a bundle of flowers at sunset while our girls run around the yard playing with the dog or chickens. It has become a happy and refreshing time, once again encapsulating the special and ordinary moments for our family but also of the flowers.

Flowers entice all the senses, but where they indulge the senses is visual. Even on Instagram, without holding or smelling the flowers, they surely make you want them! A quality photo can really engage with your audience and customer base. It can make a bride want to book you as a wedding florist or create anticipation for your pop-up sale.

Whether you are using your phone as a camera or are exploring using a more sophisticated camera such as a mirrorless or DSLR, we are sharing some tips on how to elevate your photography!

Have a Subject

What is a “subject”?

The subject is the focus of your photo.

This can be a flower in the field, a person, a building, a bouquet, a floral design, etc. What do you want to highlight and show?

Take the Dahlia photo as an example. Where is your eye drawn to? The bottom dahlia is in focus and draws your eye to it, while the surrounding flowers and foliage are more blurred. A photo can have multiple flowers, but a good photo will have one main subject.

An easy subject to pull off that usually does well is a person in the photo. Not only does this make it easier to have a subject, but it also works dual-fold for flower farming business owners in that if flower farmers can be the subject of their blooms, it creates a story and builds trust with customers.

Lighting

Avoid Hard Light on Your Subject

The extremes between the dark shadows and washed-out highlights do not have a desirable effect on your photo’s subject. This is when you lose desirable detail in your image, such as the ideal color, but the hard light emphasizes undesirable details, such as wrinkles and blemishes.

This hard light can even change the representation of your flowers through the photo; usually, it is not for the better. See the two photos below for the difference between Rock Run Ashley's appearance.

We are located in the High Desert of Northern Nevada, where the sun shines bright, and the skies are a stunning blue. However, the light is too harsh to take good photographs during the middle of the day. Honestly, at that time of day in peak summer, the plants don’t look their best, nor does the flower farmer. It’s just too hot!

The best time of day for photos in the field is similar to the optimal time the flowers prefer to be harvested, during the cooler parts of the day.

The Golden Hour

The best time of day for lighting is the “Golden Hour.” There are two times of day when this opportunity exists: right after the sun rises and right before it sets. It truly transforms the field, where the flowers look washed out. All of a sudden, they are full of vibrancy and life!

Early in the morning, we often shuffle children off to school, are busy getting harvesting done, or are just lazily sipping coffee! The sunset golden hour, however, is really when our field comes into its beauty. All of a sudden, the exhaustion and annoyance of the bugs melt away, and you have the opportunity to see your field in its glory! Yes, this is true for your field, too!

The glow of the sun is soft and inviting. Even if you don’t want to take the leap into full-on photography, take advantage of the lighting of the Golden Hour; it makes any subject and photo look amazing!

Now, if you need to get some shots of your flowers and cannot take advantage of the Golden Hour, let’s discuss the next best thing!

Cloudy Days

If you are in a climate that gets cloud cover, those grey skies will significantly enhance your photos!

The clouds act as a natural diffuser of the sun, softening the light and creating a dreamy atmosphere for photos.

There have been many times when we didn’t have the luxury of waiting for the Golden Hour, but we could take advantage of the clouds covering the sun just right to get a nice soft light on the subject.

What do you do if you can’t utilize the Golden Hour without a cloud in sight?

Backlight Your Subject

If you need to take a photo during conditions that cast hard light on your subject, backlight your subject.

Backlighting is when you place your subject in a way where the sunlight is your primary lighting source and is behind your subject. This is a great way to make your subject stand out in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Now that we have covered the basics of lighting your subject, let’s explore other techniques to take your photos to the next level!

Compositional Techniques to Elevate Your Photos

The key with the following techniques is that if you can stack them upon each other and use them all, the easier and better your photos will turn out, but even a combination of some of the techniques will indeed have you churning out beautiful images.

Leading Lines

If you took photography in high school, you might be familiar with leading lines, which are lines that lead the viewer’s eye to the photo's subject.

For our photographs, we frequently use our rows as leading lines for field photos. We use the aisle as a leading line when photographing a wedding ceremony. Even a stem of a flower can be a leading line.

Subject Separation

Subject separation is when you compose the photo to give distance between the subject, its background, and the surrounding components.

This is where you create a blurred background, and other elements are also blurred to make the subject prominently stand out. This is often done by shooting your camera’s aperture wide open, but a phone’s “portrait mode” also has a similar effect.

Controlling the Horizon Line

The last compositional technique we use heavily in our photographs is controlling the horizon, letting it break up the photo, and placing different pieces of your subject in front of it.

This technique is especially useful when photographing in the flower field. Controlling the horizon line takes moving around, getting down on the level of your subject to get a portion of the ground, the horizon, and the sky. You can use the Rule of Thirds, getting a third of the ground, a third of the horizon, and a third of the sky.

When controlling the horizon line, your subject placement is critical. You don’t want the horizon to cut off your subject’s head, for example. You want to place your subject so that the horizon lines are naturally flowing.

We typically photograph more than half of our photos at a 50/50 of ground to sky with the horizon in the middle. The second most common way we photograph is with the sky filling the top third of the photo and the bottom two-thirds being the ground.

The truth is that there is no right or wrong way to place your horizon in your shot, but it does help the composition of a photo to have it in it and not just point your camera at the ground when taking pictures of flowers.

Editing your Photos

Composing and lighting your subject is half the battle to create a great photo. In film photography, the other half happens in the darkroom as you develop the film, check the grain, crop it using an enlarger, and then slosh the print into the developing agent. You do not escape these next steps. They are just a little more accessible.

Modern digital cameras, and even camera phones, provide you with an image that is meant to be processed in post on the computer or phone, which will bring out the best of the image. The image “straight out of the camera” is typically flat, lacking contrast between the highlights and the shadows, and the colors lack contrast. This may not sound ideal, but we want this out of the camera.

Without a deep explanation of why this is a good thing, the flat image stores information to give you control over making the image what you want. As Ansel Adams said, “[y]ou don’t take a photograph, you make it.”

You can make it using post-editing programs, such as those on your phone or computer, or they can be more advanced, such as Adobe Lightroom.

Here are some basic tips when editing your photograph:

Lightly Edit

Stay away from being too heavy-handed in manipulating the image in the post. Especially as flower farmers, keeping the colors more natural will make the image of the flowers more realistic, therefore setting more realistic expectations for customers who see your photographs. The colors can be enhanced but should still stay true to the subject. Since photos out of the camera are flat, you need to increase the contrast between the highlights and lowlights, which can be done by increasing the contrast.

Exposure

Typically, whether using a camera or a phone camera, along with creating a more flat image, the camera also evenly exposes the image. The more exposed a photo is to the highlights (aka. everything is bright), the less saturation and vibrancy it has. To create a more natural and organic enhancement of color, instead of increasing saturation or vibrancy, slightly pull down the exposure.

Cropping Images

Cropping images when editing the photo balances the image. This is also a good time to level the photo if it was not leveled when taking the picture. For Instagram and other social media platforms, the best ratio is 4:5, filling the most space Instagram is willing to give an image, thus maximizing the amount of visual real estate.

When cropping, especially for beginners, having the subject centered in the photo will make it stand out better.

Photography is a great way to share the story of your flower farming journey. It is also necessary in today’s world, where a potential customer will research us on social media or our website before reaching out.

Taking quality photos doesn’t mean you need an expensive camera; it does mean taking the time to utilize the best light, properly compose the image, and edit it. Over the growing season, give yourself time to practice photographing your process from seed to row prep and flowers.

Give your potential customers a peek behind the scenes of the wondrous world of flower farming.

Until next time, we are looking forward to helping you hand blooms soon!

- Jessica & Graham

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