Camellia flower
To take pictures of flowers, which is especially rewarding now in Spring, I use my 100mm macro lens and aim for a shallow depth of field with a big aperture, so as to blur the surroundings of the main subject - I only want the flower and the dew drops in sharp focus.
Macro lenses tend to have a shallower depth of field anyway, so for this photograph I used an f-stop of f/6.3 in aperture priority, the resulting shutterspeed was 1/300.
I had set the ISO to 100 first and of course I used a tripod, which is a habit of mine, not that you would need it by all means with this fast shutter speed.
I was also lucky, that there was absolutely no wind that morning, so the flower "sat" quite still.
If you cannot set your camera manually, there is actually a little flower on most compact cameras as a scene mode, so you want to use that for close-ups of flowers.
For a shallow depth of field the portrait mode is the nearest option but you might not get near enough to your flower, so try to experiment with these settings and then choose what you like best.
For a shallow depth of field the portrait mode is the nearest option but you might not get near enough to your flower, so try to experiment with these settings and then choose what you like best.
