GORGEOUS GARDENS

Professional garden photographer Clive Nichols shares his top techniques and tips for capturing stunning macro flower images

TECHNIQUE ASSESSMENT

Clive showed Matthew how to set up his camera to capture the best-possible images of plants and flowers

APERTURE PRIORITY

To start with, Clive set Matthew's Canon EOS R7 to Aperture priority mode (Av on the mode dial). The aperture is a hole, the size of which is controlled by a series of blades inside of the lens and Av mode allows you to make the aperture larger or smaller to let in more or less light. This also affects your depth of field, or how much of the scene is in sharp focus. It's a semi-automatic mode - you set the aperture and the ISO, leaving the camera to work out the required shutter speed for a correct exposure.

CHECK THE HISTOGRAM 

The histogram is a useful graph that shows you the distribution of tones in an image, from deep blacks on the left to bright highlights on the right, with midtones in the middle. On most cameras you can view the histogram while composing in Live View, or when reviewing images in playback mode. Ideally, in a typical image containing a full range of tones, the histogram should be evenly spread out and not bunched up towards one end or the other, as this indicates that your image is overexposed or underexposed, and some exposure information is likely to be lost.

EXPERT INSIGHT

HIGHLIGHT ALERT

Clive uses the Highlight alert option on his Canon EOS 5DS R to see if any of the bright tones in his images have clipped to pure white. When you enable Highlight alert any clipped highlights will briefly flash black when the image is played back on the rear LCD. This tells you that there's no exposure information in these areas, and you'll need to adjust your exposure settings to ensure that any delicate highlights are retained.

PRO TIP

ZOOM IN TO CHECK SHARPNESS