When the natural world wakes up from its winter slumber, it’s an exciting time for a photographer – but instead of shooting generic images we recommend exploring abstract spring photography.

Photos of bluebells and daffodils are all well and good, but we’ve seen hundreds of them before, right? With a little ‘outside the box’ thinking you can shoot those things (and more!) in new and exciting ways.

Flowers make fantastic subjects for abstract photography because of the manner in which the light plays across the petals and creates dreamy bokeh and subtle shifts in colour. Move in really close with a macro lens and explore the shapes and shades – you might be surprised at how many images you can get from just one flower!

If, however, you’re a little bit more creative and have reasonable Photoshop skills, you can build really innovative abstract images by merging close-ups from a number of flowers of different colours for a unique effect. If you do this well, we’re sure that nobody will guess that the resulting image is a composite of flowers!

Water is mysterious and interesting to photograph at any time of year, but when using it as a subject for abstract spring photography we find it’s best to focus on the play of light and the vibrant colours. Find a spot where there are reflections and the light is doing interesting things and shoot away. As always with abstract photography, the more playful you can be the better – it really doesn’t matter if you take hundreds of images and most of them don’t work!

By using different lenses, filters and angles you can surprise yourself again and again… plus you might find a technique that you can translate into more conventional photographic genres.

Trees make great subjects for photography, but photos of groups of them can often look a bit directionless as it’s hard to make one particular tree a focal point, but with an abstract approach you can embrace this a bit more and make use of the chaos! Consider close-up shots of the trunk or branches of a tree, or you can shoot straight up into the canopy and play around with out of focus images that leave you with different areas of light and shade – try it, it works a treat.

Embracing abstract spring photography is a great way to get out and about with your camera and come home with some images for an interior design project – abstract canvas prints look great in any room, and it’s nice to add a personal touch with your own work.