Sun or shade?

Rather than hijack Anna's thread, a new on for the question of sun vs shade for flowers.

I tried today with a geranium (not much else in the garden at the moment).

Sun



and shade



Nearly identical shots - I did move the camera a little between the two - but identical settings, identical processing. The only real difference is the light source. The sun picks out many more details and has greater contrasts, as you'd expect, which makes the background much more obtrusive. The stem and leaves have also come out darker (in fairness the whole 'sun' shot is a touch darker).

This is why I go for shade, but I would love to become better at full sun flowers. So any tips would be much appreciated.

I don't think anyone could hijack a thread - I'm considering them to be shared. But thanks. It's an interesting question. I will experiment with my bridge to try and put my finger on what's bothering me about light. It's been so dull /dark here that I haven't been out much with the camera.

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You may remember from GW that I have a love of silhouettes against blue sky. I am longing for those days to come again.

For me full sun works great for deeper colours and only if there are no glossy leaves etc. in the background. I never try to shoot white or yellow flowers in full sun. But my new camera (Canon EOS 6D Mk2) has a setting called 'Highlight Tone Priority (HTR)' which is supposed to stop highlights burning out. I save all my settings in a pre-set on the mode dial as C1 and then I've added the HTR onto that and saved that to C2 so that I can quickly switch if I find myself troubled by strong sun. I used it in the recent Viburnum image when the background leaves were a bit too bright. But then I didn't do a comparison shot without it so the jury's still out.

The strong spring and summer light but with cloud cover (ie. a white cloud day) is what I like best.

I love the middle one in particular, Anna, I'm a huge fan of backlighting. And the bottom one works as a semi-abstract. For me, the top one is too dark in the leaves but that's personal taste.

I'd love your new camera, but although I can stretch to a 2nd hand 70D that it out of my reach, sadly. Especially as I'd like to improve the magnification of my macros - I'm toying with the Raynox as I can't afford the Canon 65mm f/2.8 1-5x that I drool over.

Back to light... I'm going to experiment more. I'm off to the forest this afternoon to an area that has superb wildflowers, so should be able to find sun, shade and anything in between. Yes to the backgrounds being an issue, and the burned out highlights. There is still the question of contrasts, and the overall softness that more diffuse light gives. But I'm all up for trying anything. We'll see how I get on.

This is from Switzerland (with the good light). I suspect I went that dark to be able to show the internal organs of the bee.



I got it second hand for a song about five years ago from a local professional photgrapher who was off loading gear. It has just sat in its case. Hopefully now that things have calmed down for me I can turn back to exploring it. Thank you for the encouragement.