It’s the daylight savings time of year. The snow is starting to melt, the days are starting to get a bit warmer and you start hearing the birds chirping. Spring provides terrific opportunities for nature photography and after a long cold winter, the freshness and increasing daylight hours make it a great time to be outdoors with a camera.
Spring is a great time to take advantage of capturing nature’s renewal and to enjoy the fresh air after a cold season of hunkering down. Here are a few of my favourite springtime subjects and locations that you may enjoy as well.
Wildlife
This is the time of year when wildlife starts to become more active. Birds return from their migrations and the animals that do not migrate to warmer climates, become more visible. This provides even more opportunities for wildlife photography compared to the winter.
While I went over this in my winter tips and ideas blog post, it’s equally important in spring and all year round for that matter. Be sure to use good, ethical judgement when you’re out interacting with wildlife to ensure that you do not cause them any stress or interference. If you see that they feel stressed, stop their regular activities and/or are not comfortable, then you’re too close to the animal. Give them space by backing off slowly. Never bait them with food for the purpose of getting a photo.
To avoid stressing animals out, use a telephoto lens so you can get close up images of the animal without being too close to them. Be respectful, and move around as slowly and quietly as possible so that you don’t startle them. To find out more, including some core principles around nature photography, click here to review the Nature First website. While Nature First discusses the principles for nature photography generally, it equally applies to wildlife.
Local Parks and Gardens
Take advantage of your local parks and gardens to photograph the new flower blooms that spring brings. Cherry blossoms are one very popular flower bloom synonymous with spring but have a short blooming period. There is a wide variety of plants and flowers that you can photograph, some blooming at different times too and often, you can find locations with a wide variety of plants and flowers in one place.
New blooms provide a good opportunity for close up or macro photography, so remember to bring a macro lens with you. If you don’t have a macro lens, a zoom lens will work well too. Check out my blog post on using a zoom lens for close up photography. Make sure to give yourself lots of time when you’re on location, and take your time. That way, you can maximize your opportunities to get great images of a wide range of flowers and plants.
Backyard Photography
Many of these spring photo opportunities may be readily available to you right in your own backyard. If you don’t already have one, you can create a flower garden in your backyard to photograph not just during the spring bloom, but at any time of year. You may already have birds, squirrels, butterflies or any other wildlife as regular visitors to your backyard, or even to the trees that surround your backyard. If you live in an apartment or condo, you can check out the gardens for your building.
Waterfalls
With the spring thaw comes higher water levels in lakes, streams and rivers, as the melting snow runs off. The higher water levels and faster moving water will make waterfalls stronger and faster flowing, making spring a great time of year to photograph waterfalls.
When photographing waterfalls, remember to bring your neutral density filters so that you can slow down your shutter speed without overexposing your image. They act like sunglasses for your camera. That will allow you to get those white milky “streaks” of the moving water. Also, bring a polarizing filter which will help you reduce a lot of glare in the water, as well as on any foliage that surrounds the water.
Post-Processing Tips
Even with a zoom lens, you may still not get your subject as large as you’d like in your image. To get the subject to the size you want would mean cropping your image but if it’s a significant crop that you need to make, then your image quality will suffer. While not as important if you’re just looking to share your photos on social media, it may be more important if you’re looking to print your image, especially at a larger size.
My go-to software for cropping images while maintaining image quality is Topaz Labs Gigapixel AI. The software is very flexible in how you want the final dimensions of your cropped image to be “upscaled”. You can choose as set magnification for scaling up the image (e.g. 2X) or you can choose the exact pixel width or height that you want the final image to be. Gigapixel AI does a great job in resizing your image while maintaining image quality through its AI models.
Cropped image and resized to the dimensions of the original file using the Standard AI model. This 75% view shows the detail loss in the original with just a straight crop.
Original
Cropped
