Bluebonnet Portraits

It has been a couple years since our last family bluebonnet portrait session. If you have lived in Texas for any amount of time then you know come Spring, the highways and back roads are filled with these purple flowers.

My Tips for Shooting Bluebonnet Portraits

When framing your shot remember that you won’t need to find the largest field of bluebonnets, any patch of flowers can potentially be the perfect spot. Pay close attention to the foreground and background, by ensuring you have bluebonnets in each of these areas of your frame.

Then position your subjects in the upper third of the frame. I like the foreground slightly blurred, so that the eye naturally focuses on your subjects. Your subjects should be tack sharp, I recommend an F stop between 4 and 8. I do not recommend going below f/4 for group shots unless your shooting one subject.

The reason, anyone behind or in front of your focusing point will be slightly out of focus because f/4 has a shallow focal plane. Remember that the your lens focal length and f-stop will determine how much bokeh your image has. For this image my focal length was 105mm at F/5.6, ISO 320.