Garden photography for beginners
Garden photography is really just landscape photography in a controlled environment so all the principles of landscape photography apply (if you are very interested in this genre Emma has written a book: Beginner’s Landscape Photography). The things beginners have issues with are usually these:
The garden looks too small in your shot.
The flowers you noticed don’t stand out in your image.
You don’t know how to make it look good; your photos are more like snapshots.
Garden looks too small
The camera compresses the three dimensions you see when you are there in person into a two-dimensional image that you view on a screen or on paper. All the cues your brain adds to the scene as you stand atop a viewpoint will be lost as the camera ruthlessly records only what is actually seen on the sensor.
For example you’ve just walked up that long hill at RHS Wisley; your brain remembers this and layers the experience on what your eyes perceive as you look back where you came from. Maybe you have been coming to a garden over many years; your brain will combine all those memories with what you are seeing in the moment to give a perception that is hard to capture just with a camera.
This is what to do: start really paying attention to where everything is in the frame. You need to force your brain to look at details you skipped over; you think that flower bed is the main subject in the photo but when you look carefully it doesn’t actually take up that much space and is lost against the background.
Flowers don’t stand out
The effect you’re trying for here is known as “background separation”. You want to avoid the star blooms being confused with whatever is behind them.
Use a wide aperture (eg. f2.8) to achieve a shallow depth of field and focus very carefully on the main flower. If you don’t understand apertures sign up for Emma’s foundation course for complete beginners (free by email) at the end of this post.
If you can’t change your aperture move your viewpoint until the flower is set against something of a contrasting colour.
The white border at Parham House & Gardens shot at f2.8
How to make it look good
You need a combination of good composition and interesting light (or at least light that isn’t distracting) for an eye-catching photo.
To improve your composition analyse other people’s photos that you like. Get some tracing paper and trace over the main elements to see where in the frame they positioned them. Have they used things like footpaths and shadows to nudge your eye in a certain direction in the frame? What is overlapping in the image? Is anything distracting? Where does your eye go first? Where does your eye go next?
To get interesting light pay attention to the shadows. When the sun is low in the sky the shadows will be long and introduce texture and depth to the scene. At midday the shadows will be virtually non-existant and if the sun is bright the contrast will be high. On a cloudy day you will have a soft, evenly-lit scene. None of these conditions is better than the other; they are just all very different.
Emma runs an online course, The Art of Flower Photography, once a year each June. Join the next presentation here (in 2021 it starts 7 June): click to join
Join A Year With My Camera
Emma’s online camera course for complete beginners is free by email and will have you understanding aperture by the end of the second week. Join here and get started today:
