Garden Photography: How To Create A Photographer’s Garden

Person Taking Pictures Of A Flower Garden
photography
(Image credit: skyNext)

A lively, flourishing garden offers an endless supply of great plant shots for photographers. With garden photography, you get a great double prospect, opportunities for beautiful images and the chance to shoot them close to home.

If you want to make your backyard into a wonderful spot for taking pictures, read on for information about how to create a photographer’s garden. You’ll also find tips for garden photography.

What is a Photography Garden?

What is a photography garden? It is, quite simply, a garden filled with images that someone with a camera would love to snap. This could be a hummingbird sipping from a salvia, a bee on a rose, a tree standing bare in winter moonlight, or dew drops on a birch leaf.

Healthy plants are graceful and colorful. They evolve through the seasons, often budding in spring, blooming in summer, dropping leaves in fall, and standing serene and quiet in winter. Any backyard garden filled with flowering plants and trees is a perfect photography garden.

Creating a Garden for Photographers

Garden photographers are interested in vivid, detailed images of the different chapters of a plant’s life. To make a photographer’s garden, invest energy in the garden you have, helping the plants grow and thrive.

A garden for photographers is one that is constantly evolving. Add plants with visual interest, foliage plants with texture, or twining vines with beautiful blossoms. When your garden is thriving, you will have a range of plant life a photographer can work with – seedlings and mature plants, buds and flowers, and pollinators of different kinds.

You can also create a photographer’s garden by bringing in romantic or interesting hardscape things such as bridges, trellises, or statuary. Add a winding footpath lined with poppies, a birdbath near the hydrangeas, or a wooden chair beneath the oak tree. These will offer the kind of images that make photographing a garden interesting.

How to Do Garden Photography?

If you create a photographer’s garden, you will probably want to engage in this type of photography as well. Remember, you don’t have to do it perfectly right away. Simply take your camera into the garden and shoot images that capture your attention.

While you are out in the garden, practice different photography skills, like working with varying light conditions at different times of the day and year. Try taking shots of moving images like buzzing wings of an insect or windblown grasses. Don’t worry if it doesn’t come out the way you want. Just keep trying until you like the result.

Teo Spengler
Writer

Teo Spengler has been gardening for 30 years. She is a docent at the San Francisco Botanical Garden. Her passion is trees, 250 of which she has planted on her land in France.