Spring Photography Ideas
It’s warming up, the suns coming out and the flowers are in full bloom. It must be spring and there’s no better time to get out there with your camera and do some spring photography. In this tutorial, we’re going show you how to photograph the delights of this season by giving you some spring photography ideas.
You’ll be shown some classic spring photography as well as some ideas you may not have thought of. The kind of insight you only get when you’ve been doing spring photography for years! I’ll also be giving you my tips and sharing the best settings for photographing spring. And as a bonus, I’m going to get the drone out!
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Spring Photography Idea 1 - The Classic Bluebell Shot
A lovely part of spring is seeing all the bluebells starting to appear, so why not get out and photograph them. A great technique here is to have one sharp bluebell with blurry ones in the foreground as well as the background. This will help highlight the beauty of this flower whilst surrounding it with blurry purples and greens.
To get a shallow Depth of field simply zoom in as far as your lens will go and put your aperture on its widest setting. If you’ve got a lens that goes to f2.8, great but if not an aperture of f4 or f5.6 will work fine with a higher focal length. To learn more about focal lengths, apertures and depth of field, click here.
To learn more about Bluebell photography, click here to view our tutorial.
f2.8 - 1/200 - ISO 200 - Aperture priority mode
Remember it’s not just bluebells that pop up in spring. Try the same with other classic spring flowers like daffodils and snowdrops.
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Spring Photography Idea 2 – Bring Spring Inside
Why not set up your own still life photography inside. Very simple idea this one. Bring some flowers inside, arrange them and photograph them. A good tip here is to make the look bright and airy. Have lots of soft light and using the colour white as a backdrop is always a winner. To learn how to create soft light for photography, click here.
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Spring Photography Idea 3 – Leading Lines
Composition is important in every photograph but when walking in the woods in spring, one thing you find is lots of fallen branches and logs. This gives a fantastic opportunity to use these logs as foreground interest to lead your eye through the frame.
In my examples, I have rested the camera directly on top of logs to create this classic compositional look. To learn how composition can help your photography, click here.
f5.6 - 1/80th second - ISO 200 - Aperture priority mode
f2.8 - 1/250th second - ISO 200 - Aperture priority mode
Spring Photography Idea 4 - Find the details
Spring is bursting with life so let’s find that life, focus on it and show it using photography. This could be seed pods, insects, flowers or whatever takes your fancy. The typical technique here is to have a shallow depth of field as with the bluebell shots previously.
Simply zoom in, have a wide aperture and set a fast shutter speed. Setting a fast shutter speed will help avoid camera shake. If you’re shooting in bright light you shouldn’t have any problems here with using your aperture priority mode but if you’re in a low light setting you will have to use a tripod and adjust your ISO to compensate for the lack of light. To learn how to expose correctly in photography, click here.
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Spring Photography Idea 5 - Wide Spring Scenes
Take a walk outside the forest to see the spring landscape in all its glory. This could be a field of spring flowers, looking back at blooming trees or as in my example a field of rapeseed. The yellow of the rapeseed works well against the blue sky due to the way the colours react to each other. Not quite the classic complementary colour scheme but near enough and who can argue with blue and yellows not looking nice in spring! To learn more about colour in photography, click here.
This technique is different to the shallow depth of field look of the other examples. Here you generally want a long depth of field which is created using a small aperture such as f16. Also, to show a wide expanse you generally use a wide-angle such as 24mm on a full-frame camera. To learn about focal lengths in photography, click here.
f2.8 - 1/3200th second - ISO 100
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Bonus Idea - Get the drone out!
Ok, I know most people don’t have drones but if you do it gives a really great perspective on spring. Get in up in the air and give a bird’s eye view of spring. Having that elevation above the trees or looking down on fields really adds something new to your photography.
f2.8 - 1/160th second - ISO 100
Your Spring Photography
Above are photos and ideas to get you inspired this spring. If this tutorial does inspire you to take photos, we’d love to see them. Simply #theschoolofphotography on social media so we can see them.
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