One from the patio and one from the kitchen!
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Really like the first one.....
GardenersHelper
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Some thoughts. All IMO, and YMMV of course.
Droplets, ice, decaying and dead plants (for example at the moment there are some interesting colours and textures here on fallen leaves), old berries, seed pods, moss, lichen, fungi, occasional flowers, buds. Get out, move very slowly and keep looking; be patient and just enjoy being out of doors. If you find something to photograph, that is a bonus.
You might want to "look with the camera" some of the time rather than just using your eyes. I find that especially with botanical subjects it isn't until I offer the camera up to a scene and take a shot that I realise what it is going to look like; sometimes it is quite surprising, pleasantly so. Experimenting with apertures and angle of attack can help too when you find something you think might produce a nice image. Sometimes a particular angle and/or a particular aperture makes everything fall into place in a pleasing way. Capture lots of variations of a promising scene. Sometimes you will get a nice result, but don't worry too much about that out in the field. Keep trying options. It is easier to see what has really worked well later when looking at the results on the PC. Don't worry about throwing away huge numbers of attempts that didn't work out.
Also look for "play of light" shots, for example where direct sunlight illuminates a subject, or part of it, but not the background, or only some of it. Even sometimes when the sun illuminates the background but not the subject; post processing, see below, can be particularly important in that case. I also look out for subjects where the illumination is varying, either because the pattern of light changes as sunshine comes through foliage or branches that are moving in a breeze, and/or the subject is moving around in a breeze. Don't try and "catch the perfect moment", because it may pass faster than you can react in breezy conditions. Take lots of shots and be prepared to work through them later. Don't worry if nothing worked. Sometimes it will, and you'll be delighted. Working in breezy conditions also fits in with (see below) experiments with shutter speed and ISO.
I've not done much with small invertebrates, but I think some of them are around longer than the larger ones. For example, for a week or two I have not seen any of the medium sized flies and spiders that I often photograph in our garden, but I have found some much smaller flies, a springtail and a barkfly. I don't know how far into the winter any of them are still around. I'm intending to explore that this year.
I've never really got into it, but some people get fascinating results indoors using things like old CDs, coloured liquids, falling drops of water and who knows what else.
You might also want to spend some time experimenting, for example with post processing, which can make a huge difference to the look of images, with flash and diffusion setups, and with apertures and ISOs (in combination with post processing) to see whether you can enlarge the range of what you can achieve, and also experiment with shutter speeds both with flash (to see the effect on backgrounds of slowing down exposures) and with natural light (to see how slow a shutter speed you can use in different sorts of conditions. The better practical grasp you have of how all these things fit together the better able you will be able to get pleasing results in a wider variety of circumstances.
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