How to take perfect palm tree pictures

Palm tree pictures can be great as they may remind you about a great tropical vacation or a nice place which you visited some time back. There are many varieties of palm trees and they all make for lovely pictures. However, you want your picture to be more visually pleasing than a plain picture of a palm tree. Here are some tips for taking perfect palm tree pictures.

Where to shoot and what to include

Many parts of the palm tree are interesting to photograph. The entire tree has an interesting shape: one or several images of trees can make a nice shot. Standing at the base and shooting up at the top can produce interesting textures and patterns. The fronds are particularly photogenic, especially after rain or with various lighting effects. You can get really creative and take a close-up of the fronds from above or below. Another option is having another object in the photograph, for instance, a boat sailing past, an animal, or a human lounging in a hammock. When photographing more than one palm tree, you may want to try a wide angle lens that will make the background seem more distant.

Taking a picture of a silhouette

One very popular kind of trees clip art or palm tree art is the silhouette. To take a photograph of palm trees in silhouette, you need to have a light source behind them. This can be the sun coming up, going down, or artificial light, such as the lights of a city. You also need to turn off your flash so that the palm tree will be black or close to it. Shooting right before or right after sunset will make a nice shot, as the colours in the sky slowly change during this time. Around dawn is another good time to take pictures of silhouettes. The best times are two hours before and two hours after sunrise and sunset. You need to remember that the foreground will be dark. Therefore, you will not have to worry about objects which are found there as long as the light is not reflecting off of them.

Backgrounds

Clouds can add a lot of colour and interest to a picture. At sunset, they will change colour and practically create the picture for you. You can see beams of light passing between them and the colours will be magical. Usually, the best kinds of clouds are the thin ones as they will retain colour for a longer period of time. Even though an FLD filter is used for shots taken under fluorescent lights, it can be used in shooting at dawn and dusk to add purple hues to the sky.