I love to take photos of flowers from my garden. I love creating a record of the beautiful flowers in my garden. I am lucky I guess because I can still take photos of my flowers in my yard almost year around, as I live in San Diego, which probably is another reason I love take flower photos all the time. In fact, I just took these rose photos this week – sorry those of you that got snow this week! The good news is every season be it in snow or sun, each season lends to great photos that can be taken.
Nature provides a lot of wonderful shots, and I love taking nature photos and then creating embellishments for digital scrapbooking projects!
Don’t be Shy — Get Closer to your Nature Shot!
When you take a nature shot getting closer is one tip that often improves the photo.
For example, to the left is the rose in my garden that I wanted to take some photos of.
Here is my flower in my garden at a 55mm focal length – not very impressive? The flower is not even interesting at this distance!
So I took my zoom lens and zoomed into the same flower at 18mm this time, 
and this certainly was a big step up to getting a photo that was more interesting and pleasing to look at!
See the example to the right and you would probably agree that this is a much improved photo of this same flower.
At this point my zoom lens will not get any closer.
However, with little cost to me I can do something to give me the opportunity to get a even closer look at this flower.
Have you heard of close-up lens? They are like putting reading glasses on your camera lens! Really! I am not kidding! My camera can get reading glasses too!
They usually come in packs of 3 and you can use them individually on your zoom lens or you can screw each lens on the other to make get more magnification!
I got this set of close-up lens for around $15 and they come with a case to hold the 3 lens (1x, 2x, and 4x). See this great deal now for 4 close-up lens for around $10!
So here is what they can do for you for you, when you see something you want to really get a close photo of a flower, a leaf, a twig with snow, or some other great nature photo opportunity.
Zoom your SRLs zoom lens in as far as it goes, 
then put on the first close up lens. In my example that would be the 1x close-up lens. I just screwed it on the end of my zoom lens. Then re-took the photo of the same flower above. Here is how it looks now.
You can see that it made a difference, and I can now see the some texture on the rose petals. This probably would be a great photo to turn into a digital scrapbooking embellishment!
Now I could take off the close-up lens and screw in a new more powerful one, or I could just screw the next one on to the last lens — I choose the last option for this demonstration.
Here is the same flower with my zoom lens at 18mm, and one close-up lens at 1x, and a second close-up lens at 2x – both close-up lens screw on together at the end of my zoom lens.
I love this photo, you can see the dew drops on the petals and veins in each of the petals too!
For this blog article I had to reduced the size of this image to fit in the article, but the original image is amazing! The photo is very detailed and the photo has more detail than my eyes can see no matter how close I get — I need reading glasses – so maybe with my reading glasses I could see this detail too!
Next, I put the last close-up lens on over the others. This lens is 4x close-up lens and you can see how close you can get now!
This one is so close that even in this photo that has been reduced for this article you still can see the dew on the flower and the veins in the petals! Now in this photo the center of the rose is more prominent and more interesting!
Close up lens can bring you so much closer to whatever you want to photograph. Nature photos come alive! Plus, compared to buying another expensive lens, it works out just as well but is much less expensive than buying a lens that that could cost hundreds of dollars! Compared to that, the close-up lens are cheap! Like I said I got mine for about $15 for the whole set of three!
Close-up lens Tips: To use close up lens you need a SRL camera. A camera that has interchangeable lens. Another close-up tip is that the size close up lens you need to buy must match the size of the lens you want to screw them on to. To find out what size your lens is usually you look inside the rim of the lens and the size is usually printed there. For example, for my Cannon zoom lens the size is 58mm. So I get close-up lens that are that size too!
Hope you try getting closer when you take nature photos this year!
Have a very nice day!
PS. Once you have the great close-up photo you might want to make your pic into a digital scrapbooking embellishment. See this article on how to do that, 3 Photography Tips to Convert Flower Pics into Digital Scrapbooking Supplies!
Also, you might want to get more flower photo tips: Take Gorgeous Flower Photos: 4 Anytime Tips for Pretty Floral Pics
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If you are interested in the digital scrapbooking kit that was used with our homemade flower embellishment, and looks great with other flower embellishments you might make — then check out this kit at our Scrap Shop!
The Gardening 2 Digital Scrapbooking Kit is an adorable, country-style garden-themed kit, great for digitally scrapping another one of your favorite hobbies … gardening!
Use this fun, earth-tone kit to scrap your favorite photos of the kids planting flowers or your favorite fruit and veggies growing in your garden! This kit comes with 11×8.5″ digital papers and several digital embellishments!
