The following steps walk you through shooting a flower close up without additional lighting:

1. Select the flower you want to photograph. Use a post or twine to hold the stem in place and keep the plant from moving.

2. Set up your camera and tripod to provide a tight composition. You can orient your camera straight down, at a three-quarters view, from the side, or even from underneath depending on how you want to show the flower.

3. Check your background. If it’s cluttered or just generally uninteresting, try positioning a piece of black or green cloth behind the plant, but don’t let it get too close to the flower. You want enough distance between the plant and your background so that the material is out of focus. Fortunately, because you’re doing close-up photography, your depth of field will be very shallow to begin with, and keeping the background out of focus shouldn’t be difficult.

4. Check your flower. Look for any debris that you can remove or trim. Remove any insect-damaged petals; do whatever you can to spruce up the flower. This includes lightly spraying the plant with a mister (use water or glycerin) to create some water droplets on the petals. You’re creating a plant portrait, not a photojournalistic rendering, so it’s okay to make it look its best. If you are creating a photojournalistic rendering, ignore everything you just read. Instead, wait for a morning when there’s dew on the plant and shoot early in the day.

5. Focus on the flower’s stamen (the male part) and pick a small enough aperture for good depth of field—the smaller the better. Aim for f8, f11, or f16 if possible, but these settings result in slow shutter speeds.

6. Trip the shutter with a remote release if you have one; if you don’t set the camera’s self timer to take the picture. Using the self timer gives the camera time to stop shaking after you press the shutter release.

7. Add light. Supplemental light can greatly improve your flower photography in many ways. First, using a flash helps you get the small apertures you need for maximum depth of field, while helping to freeze any plant movement. Supplemental lighting also helps fill in shadow areas and balance light, and, if used properly, can help bring out more of the flower’s detail. To achieve this last benefit, you need to position your light(s) to rake across the flower from the side.

8. Use reflectors or diffusers to modify an existing light source. You don’t always have to rely on supplemental lighting to modify your light. You can position a reflector to bounce light into shadow areas, or you can use a diffuser placed between your light source and the flower to soften the light falling on it. Either way, you save the trouble of buying an accessory flash and getting it to work with your camera. Best of all, you can make your own reflectors and diffusers cheaply from stuff you probably already have.

Try to take your exposures to the extreme and don’t be afraid to get closer to your subjects. To make better photos, begin experimenting with your shutter speed and aperture selections. Take the same photo several times—once the way your camera suggests, once with a fast shutter speed and larger aperture opening, and once with a slow shutter speed and small aperture. Compare the results. Experiment. Film’s cheap, digital’s even cheaper.

There’s a comfort zone we all find ourselves in sooner or later. We’ve developed habits that work for us. We’ve figured out how to get the job done. We’ve gotten in a rut. Call it whatever you want. You’ve hit a plateau, you’re going through the motions, and you’re doing the same things over and over. There are ways to expand your photographic horizon, but you have to start by trying something different. This article offers some ideas on how to get out of your photographic rut by approaching your photographs from a couple of different perspectives, such as the panoramic view and the view you see when Mother Nature throws some weather your way. Somewhere in here should be something you haven’t tried before. Maybe it gets you out of that rut and on your way again. Using your digital camera to create panoramic images certainly is a way of expanding your photographic horizons in at least one sense of the word. There are two parts to creating striking panoramic images: the technical challenges and the creative ones. A panoramic image is one whose longer side is usually at least twice its shorter side. Common panoramic print sizes are 3 x 6, 6 x 12, and 12 x 24. More extreme versions are also used. When you get right down to it, the only real limitation on the size of panorama shots is the imagination of the photographer. Panoramic images can be a striking tool in the photographer’s bag of tricks. Because this format is so seldom seen, images created this way automatically leap out at the viewer. In addition, the panorama’s extreme dimensions can be perfectly suited for subjects that don’t quite fit the normal photographic frame. The biggest technical challenge to working in panoramic format is that your camera isn’t shooting a panoramic image, although some cameras may offer a panoramic mode. This means that you’re wasting space at the top and bottom (or sides) of the image that you’re only going to crop out. Fortunately, this problem isn’t insurmountable.

You can pick just about any subject for a panorama, but finding subject matter that truly works with the extreme dimensions is a bit more difficult. These are good challenges though. Remember, you’re trying to stretch yourself creatively here, so finding a task that fires your imagination isn’t a bad idea. Here are some potential subjects for panoramic shots:

Lighthouses: These tall, slender structures cry for panoramic treatment. Just remember you’re creating a vertical panorama.

City skylines: Instead of including lots of sky and foreground, turn the cityscape into a panorama.

Shorelines: Many images made at the shore show an empty sky forced upon the image by the tyranny of the standard photographic image dimensions. Changing to a panoramic format means the photographer can show what’s important and leave the rest out. Beach photos are a good example of this kind of thinking.

Natural wonders: Sometimes the best way to show a grand sweeping vista is by shooting a panoramic image. This format helps isolate the landscape against a small sliver of sky, making the scenery stand out.

People events: Events such as the Indy 500 or the Punkin Chunkin contest offer large numbers of people and contraptions. If you can position your camera on an elevated vantage point, you’re in position to create an effective panoramic composition that better shows the event than the normal photographic image.

You can create a panoramic photo with a digital camera in two different ways. These methods also work with film cameras, but they’re easier with a digital camera. The exception, of course, is if you invest in a high-end film camera made specifically to take panoramas or buy a cheap, disposable panoramic camera. The usual approach to creating a panoramic image with a nonpanoramic format camera is to create a series of photographs of a scene while rotating the camera a fixed amount after each image, and then stitching the photos together into one large, long panorama. This technique isn’t new. Film photographers have been doing it for decades, but in fairly limited numbers. The resulting images were more like collages than photographic prints, with the seams from one print to the next being readily apparent. The advent of digital photography, first through scanning photographic prints and later with digital cameras, made it possible to create virtually seamless panoramas. This capability has resulted in a huge increase in the number of photographers trying to create panoramic prints. The digital process is a natural for this kind of thing. You can bring the images together in Photoshop, line them up and blend them together seamlessly. Once satisfied, you can then order a print, which looks nothing like a series of pictures stitched together. There are also plenty of programs on the market that will do all the work for you, including Arcsoft’s Panorama Maker, Photo Vista Panorama Maker, and Spin Panorama to name a few.

Making the process even easier, a couple of equipment makers have created tripod heads designed specifically to handle panoramic shots. Ipix and Kaidan both offer equipment designed to use your camera properly for panoramic photography. One of the most important considerations for this kind of shooting is to position the camera lens so that it revolves around one single point. The best way to visualize this is to consider how your camera would normally sit on your tripod and maneuver. Normally, the rear end of the camera is mounted to the tripod head. This means that as you rotate the camera, its sensor spins over the same axis. At the same time the front of the lens swings through a much larger circle. To get the best results for a panoramic image, the camera needs to be positioned so the front end of the lens stays over the exact center of the tripod head instead of the back of the camera. It’s possible to create panoramas without doing this, but the results aren’t quite as good or quite as easy. The Ipix and Kaidan systems are built to help you position the camera this way. Their tripod heads will also have built in “detents” to help you more exactly position the camera for each image. The Ipix system is usually used with a 180-degree fisheye lens so you only need to make two images to create a 360 panorama. Special software stitches the image together in an Ipix format file that lets the viewer maneuver through the panorama in all directions. Or, you can just stitch the two images together in an image-editing program such as Photoshop to create an extreme panorama.

One advantage of using the method discussed in the preceding paragraphs is that it helps you to create huge, high-resolution files. Suppose you don’t consider that an advantage? Suppose you’re just interested in making panoramas for the web or your computer screen, or perhaps getting smaller prints made. There is an easier way to create a panoramic image. One that you can even stretch a bit to allow for reasonably large prints. It’s called cropping. You can crop any image into panoramic dimensions, as I explain in the following example. During a Canada/New England cruise, I shot the Boston business district from a harbor tour boat. When I shot the image, it was saved under JPEG compression making a 1.7MB file. But when you open the photo in your image editing software, it decompresses to its actual size. Consequently, this image—shot on a Canon EOS 1D camera—opened in Photoshop as an 11.6MB file. I wasn’t thrilled with either the gray sky or the gray water in the foreground, so I decided to crop this image down to a panorama. To do this, I selected Photoshop’s cropping tool and then dragged the sides in until I had cut out much of the gray sky and water. The image ratio of this particular photo is about 5 to 2. Cropping reduced the file size, too, so the resulting image file ended up being slightly less than 7MB. A 7MB file is more than large enough to make a good quality 15-inch by 6-inch print (at 180 dpi). If you want to go larger than that, there are some options. One technique that’s popular in the digital imaging community is called Stairstep Interpolation in Photoshop. The idea is that the program can do a better job of increasing resolution (upressing) in a series of small increments than it can in one big adjustment. The method works as follows:

1. Open your photo. From the Photoshop File menu, choose Image ➪Image size. Make sure that the bottom drop-down menu is set to Bi-cubic and the Constrain Proportions and Resample Image boxes are checked.

2. Go to the Resolution setting and add 10 percent to the number that’s already there. (Frequently this number will be 72 ppi because that’s a fairly standard default for digital camera images.)

3. Click the OK button. Photoshop now resizes your image to be 10 percent bigger.

4. Repeat Steps 1 through 3. Generally, you can do this about five times without noticeably degrading your image.

At least one article I’ve read on this subject maintains that you get the best results by upressing in one percent increments. It probably will work better than in 10 percent chunks; but I’m middle-aged and have to get my pictures finished before I’m retired. If you’re young, by all means, give this method a try.