Whenever I do photography workshops I visit the garden just before to get a head start on what the students will see. So it was with great delight I recently visited UC Berkeley Botanical Garden. My workshop is from my new PhotoBotanic Garden Photography e-book, the lesson on Composition and Balance, and I needed to see [...]
It is such fun to enter a botanic garden with no expectations, not knowing what, or if, there will be anything to photograph. I was in New Mexico recently, among other things photographing the Domenici Courthouse, a Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES™) project. SITES™, the landscape equivalent of LEED, now has projects becoming certified and I [...]
When you want to photograph a garden get inside it. By this I don’t mean walk off the street and step inside the fence, or move from the backyard patio onto the lawn or path. Immerse yourself in the garden, get under a tree, look through a gate, get behind a bench. By doing this you will give your [...]
I love the morning light when photographing gardens. Gardens are fresh, the air clean, and the light is sweet. It is nearly impossible to work in the hot sunny light when the brightest colors take on a contrasted, metallic look and the shady areas become black holes. In California where there is little humidity in the [...]
When the international flower industry gets together in California to show off what’s new, I’m there. The gardener in me revolts. The Gardening Gone Wild side chokes. In any practical realm, this does not compute. How does this massive display apply to any reality in the gardening world? Ahh, but the whole thing provokes. Acres [...]