digital - Why do bright red flowers end up without details?

With our DSLR, indoor flowers come out detailed. Outdoor violet and blue flowers are detailed, too.

But outdoor bright red flowers give us problems. They come out as a single flat detail-less spot. Sometimes bright yellow flowers do this too.

Why? What we are doing wrong? Is it a camera defect?

In some of our pictures of red flowers, you can see small white reflections on the petals, but on other shots, the whole red flower appears flat, as one blob of same-color pixels, lifeless and volume-less. It is disturbing.

I am not asking how to to photoshop this image. The question is how to shoot correctly in the first place.

Condition: outdoor, sunlight, Nikon D5000, unresized, unprocessed jpeg.

Answer

So the other posts are correct in that the red channel is being blown, but what you really want to know is how to overcome the issue within the camera without post editing. The Nikon D5000 has the Picture Control System giving users the ability to customize image capture preferences. Six settings are available — Standard, Neutral, Vivid, Monochrome, Portrait, and Landscape, along with the ability to create up to nine custom Picture Control settings.

I shoot with a Nikon D300 and have EXACTLY the same problem as yourself. Normally I have my picture control set to Vivid as I shoot a lot of nature, landscape and macro so it's nice to have the colours punch through. However whenever I am then shooting red flowers I change the control to either Standard or Neutral so the red is not blown.

Personally I shoot all my images in RAW (NEF) format and this allows me to change the Picture Control in post (using Nikon's NX2 software) which means I can choose the end result utilizing a larger screen and also I don't have to change the camera configuration for a single image while out in the field.

There are additional Picture Control setups that you can download at http://nikonimglib.com/opc/ but I don not know if these are compatible with the D5000, they may be as it is possible to add up to nine custom Picture Controls.