Spring is the season of growth, renewal, and sunshine. It’s also the perfect time to unpack all the photography gear that’s been gathering dust during the gloomy winter months and get back to work!
Today’s theme is all about spring photoshoot ideas to get your creative juices flowing for the season of light, color, and vibrant blooms. Spring offers a ton of potential, but it’s entirely up to you to master it, which matters a ton regardless of your photographic field!
Contents
Understanding the Essence of Spring Photography
To truly advance in your techniques, you’ll first need a grounding in what makes spring photos stand out to begin with.
As spring is the season of renewal, rebirth, and beginnings, bright themes (both visually and emotionally) reign supreme.
Think of the way that the arrival of April showers, fresh fruit, and blooming flowers makes you feel personally. Try to find ways to express that in your pictures!
By utilizing your environment to your advantage and bringing out its best features, such as color, depth, movement, and contrasts, you’ll capture the real spirit of the season!
Outdoor Spring Photoshoot Ideas
The great outdoors makes for a really straightforward choice of backdrop. After all, this is the season when nature truly blooms and wildlife returns to full activity after slumbering or migrating through winter.
Below, I curated some of my favorite ideas that you can experiment with in natural light wherever you may be out and about.
Cherry Blossom Landscapes
Blooming flowers are practically a shorthand for the spring season, an iconic image that beckons a talented shutterbug to capture it.
Particularly colorful flowers, like the cherry blossoms that break out in vibrant blooms of red and pink worldwide, are excellent candidates for a photoshoot. Get a wide angle lens and a tripod and don’t forget to dial in the right white balance to make sure those lovely colors pop!
Or, if you are feeling adventurous, you could try imaging the vanguards of this wonderful season with a telephoto or a macro lens to catch fine details up close.
Floral Fantasy Setups
It’s not just the cherry tree – all kinds of flowers and plant life begs to have its picture taken during spring!
This is the perfect season for some floral macro photography, so if that’s a side of your photography you’ve been meaning to explore, I have good news for you.
You can pick fresh flowers during spring to use in still life photos, or image them in the wild with a macro lens for awesome close-up shots. For something in between, try making a particular specimen the foreground protagonist of your next landscape photos!
Urban Spring Vibes
It doesn’t have to be all about the great outdoors, either, as brilliant as they may be during the season. The inner city also bustles with life during spring, parks experiencing a newfound bloom, and most seasonal businesses reopening in full swing.
This is an excellent opportunity for some springtime portraits of the up close and personal variety. If you’ve been lacking some practice capturing candid moments in street photography, this is your chance!
Home and Backyard Shoots
The amazing thing about this vibrant season is that you don’t even have to leave your home to get lovely daytime shots with great light!
You can take beautiful spring pictures right at your own doorstep, or even in the backyard. Macro photography opportunities abound here, as does pet photography and even sky photos, both during the day and night.
Try to get creative with the furniture, props, and subjects available to you! You’d be surprised by how well the warm light of the springtime sun casts even your ordinary, everyday surroundings.
Local Farms and Orchards
With everything in bloom, farmers of every stripe have their hands quite full during spring.
Whether you’ve always had a green thumb or have never considered it before, documenting the fields, orchards, botanical gardens, and vineyards of spring can be a great subject!
The options are plentiful: you make portraits, landscapes, macros, or little candid moments your primary focus. These kinds of photos offer a lot of room for creativity!
Baby, Kids & Family Picture Ideas
For those of you who particularly enjoy family portraits and the like, a spring photoshoot is not just a great fit due to the symbolism of life, birth, and renewal.
It’s ideal from a pragmatic perspective, too!
Spring mornings provide those cozy ‘golden hour‘ rays that us photographers chase after so much. Meanwhile, the warm weather allows us and our subjects to dress comfortably, without worrying about running over time and coming home with a sunburn or worse as is so often the case in summer.
Here are some great ideas for springtime portraits that I am sure you’ll love to incorporate into your next photo op.
New Life, New Beginnings
When celebrating your clients’ newfound parenthood, your creative ideas can’t be too intimate! You’ll need to work closely with your subjects to identify what they wish to convey most with your portraits.
In the case of a spring child, the season can be a friend to you as a photographer. And that’s not just in the form of cozy, warm light outdoors!
A flower basket, a wreath of lilies, a scene of the entire family on a wide garden blanket, or even Easter-themed decorations (as religiously-influenced as your subjects prefer) – the range of creative options is broad.
Playful Children’s Sessions
Spring also happens to be the favorite season among many children, and there’s little wonder in that. From the early morning to late dusk, the great outdoors open up to all sorts of childhood adventures.
With everything in full bloom, there’s a lot of flowers to pick, a lot of trees to climb, and rolling hills and lush greenery everywhere to explore.
You can follow your subjects on some of these escapades and capture some great candid moments along the way!
Family Portraits in Bloom
Multigenerational family portraits might be a bit more challenging, but that doesn’t mean they have to be any less fun!
Try to make use of the advantages of this season as much as you can when planning your session.
Think of coordinated, flowery outfits for your subjects, such as sun dresses and Cuban shirts. Also, shoot in natural light to bring out the warm colors and the natural beauty of your surroundings.
Of course, the choice of shooting location – preferably somewhere nicely sun-baked so you can really show off the pleasant atmosphere – does really make a big difference here.
Seasonal and Thematic Spring Concepts
For a more challenging but rewarding creative assignment, consider making the natural beauty of spring the central theme of your next photo series as opposed to just a part of it. How many ways of representing springtime visually can you think of?
Spring offers plenty of symbolic value across cultures. Below, I compiled a few fun thoughts to get you started.
Seasonal Celebrations
Among other things, spring is also the season of celebration and coming together. In almost every culture on the planet, there are various kinds of thanksgiving rituals and celebrations of love, family, or independence during spring.
Of course, these often flamboyant celebrations offer ample opportunity for some beautiful spring photos.
Whether it’s egg-painting contests during Easter or giant water fights for Songkran, these kinds of festivities offer huge amounts of aesthetic vocabulary for you to work with.
Weather-Influenced Concepts
In large parts of the world, spring brings not just ample sunlight, but also sudden wind gusts and heavy rains. In many parts of Europe and Asia, those famous April showers can turn into flash floods.
So, checking your weather forecast before heading out to shoot during spring is a must. But you can turn even adverse conditions to your favor.
Think of the visual drama of a park completely shadowed by huge thunderstorms, or the foggy outlines of a city early in the morning, flowers in the foreground covered in dewdrops.
The more you get yourself acquainted with spring’s unique weather patterns, the easier it will be to incorporate these into your photos.
Spring Wildlife Photography
As I already touched on before, spring is when nature reawakens from its wintertime slumber and most wildlife revisits its usual hunting and breeding grounds.
Migratory birds, mammals, large and small, and of course thousands of different kinds of insects, arachnids, and other critters seem to sprout up and appear almost out of nowhere during the season.
It’s the perfect time to go out, preferably armed with a telephoto lens and a macro, and wait patiently for the right moment!
Spring Outfit Inspiration for Stunning Photos
Whether you shoot portraits professionally or not, you should know that fashion can have a huge influence on the aesthetic impact of your people pictures.
Spring, with its comfortable yet warmer temperatures, offers you lots of freedom to style your subjects, and the lush greenery and vibrant colors in your surroundings will only add visual interest.
Up for the challenge? Take a look at these ideas for inspiration.
Spring Fashion Trends
Not only is spring a transitional season, allowing those experienced in the arts of layering and accessorizing to truly show off, but it is also the warmer of the two.
Hence, spring fashion revolves around an eclectic mix of fabrics and colors, in particular those suiting the warm weather such as peach yellow, whites, reds, and all sorts of pale blues.
Of course, trends change to some extent every season, so this year won’t be the same as the last or the next – you’d do well in studying some of the latest and hottest changes in spring fashion to really upgrade your photos.
Seasonal Styling & Accessories
Accessories can make or break a fashion-forward spring photography session, so putting some thought into styling before your shoot can elevate the results. Ask me how I know!
Flower wreaths, floral prints on shirts, blouses, and dresses, as well as colorful pocket squares and sun hats, are some evergreen choices that are perfectly suited to the season.
Practice Color Harmony
Balancing colors not just within an outfit but also against other subjects in the frame and the environment is a daunting task. But again, if you take a moment before your session to analyze your choices, you may find that it is actually rather straightforward!
Take note of the main hues in your surroundings – likely a lot of greens from the blooming flora and strong blues from the sky.
Take these two as your baseline and watch out for interesting contrasts, say from large flower patches, that may complement your subjects’ clothes or skin tones.
Creative Concepts and Techniques
For some extra spice, consider some of these fun little tricks that work well with almost any kind of photography.
Use these to add depth and inject something unexpected into your next project!
Make Colors Pop With Filters
If there’s any piece of photography gear that’s both hugely useful and inexpensive, yet woefully overlooked, it’s the humble lens filter.
Filters can both alter the look and feel of your photos in a myriad of ways ranging from subtle to extreme, and they can be stacked and combined for near-limitless creative freedom!
For outdoors, I recommend an ND (Neutral Density) filter which will allow you to shoot at wider apertures even in bright sunlight, a set of polarizers, and perhaps some graduated or special effects filters to fool around with!
Macro Photography
I have already mentioned macro photography in this guide a few times, so its inclusion here should be no surprise.
Armed with a macro lens, the beauty of spring goes from plentiful to almost overwhelmingly mesmerizing. Flowers, insects, all sorts of small wildlife, and natural beauty are all there for you to explore. What will you choose?
Candid Captures
Whether down the street, at a picturesque beach getaway, or even in your own front yard, candid photography can really tell the stories that a thousand words could not, if done right.
Its spontaneous approach and its frivolousness with the idea of the subject’s privacy leads some to call it an extreme genre. Others, like yours truly, love the freedom and the unpredictability candid photography provides.
In any case, spring is the perfect season to give it a shot and experiment!
Spring Photography Styles and Aesthetics
Of course, spring photos exist within an extremely diverse range of styles and attitudes, about as divergent from one another as the photographers that shoot them.
If you’re not sure where exactly you fit on the map yet, don’t despair. Take a look at some of these basic styles and aesthetics for reference!
Vintage Vibes
To many photographers, spring is the season of nostalgia and reminiscence. It’s when we take a moment to look at not just our works of the past year or so, but our lives overall.
You can lean into this by deliberately crafting a vintage look. Of course, you can achieve that by shooting on analog equipment from days gone by, including on old expired film rolls for that extra element of unpredictable vintage-ness!
On the other hand, you can still target the beauty and atmosphere of nostalgia digitally through careful post processing, color filters, and the right camera settings.
Minimalist Approach
Spring photos can also work really well when done in a subdued manner. I am talking of minimalist photography of course, a creative approach that has grown a lot in popularity in recent years.
By using a limited, yet distinct color palette and very few subjects in the frame, you can evoke particularly strong emotions from the audience.
Try to use nature to your advantage here. Those huge patches of flowers and vast fields that light up the springtime landscape can work as wonderful minimalist backdrops against the plain blue sky!
Conclusion
As we saw today, there’s no shortage of creative spring photography ideas worth trying and fooling around with. Regardless of your photographic tastes, the season offers you amazing possibilities to create and polish your skills in just about every genre.
What will be your next springtime photo series about? Let me know in the comments, and till next time!
Take Away
No matter which genre you are active in or what kind of gear you use, there is plenty of fun to be had honing your skills and broadening your horizons during the season of spring.
By playing with color harmony, exploring new compositions, and tackling new kinds of emotional themes in your photography, you can not just upgrade your skill set but even develop a deeper affection for the season and its many wonders to boot.
