Today is the first day I have picked up a camera or walked in my garden since I fell from the ladder. Details for the morbidly curious below.
This is how I feel today. Continue Reading →
Author Archive | Saxon Holt
How Does That Make You Feel ?
Whimsy and Provocation
Detail of light tubes from “SOL Grotto”
We interrupt the regularly scheduled garden photography lesson to bring you some breaking news. While I was writing this lesson in The PhotoBotanic Garden Photography Workshop, controversy erupted.
Provocation in the world of gardens and art ! National scandal in “hip, pretentious art” at the Berkeley Botanical Garden where an on-site art exhibit using recycled glass tubes became an example of “phony intellectualism”. Continue Reading →
Appreciation and Mimicry
So far, in these lessons on garden photography, we have explored the rudiments of composition and light in making good garden photos. In today’s lesson (1.4) we step back and begin to analyze why we take pictures so that we can begin to understand when to snap the shutter.
Let’s assume you are not content with simply documenting the garden – you want photos to share, not just jog your memory. You will want to have something to say, a story to tell. I hope it does not seem too obvious, but let’s start with appreciation and mimicry. First, let’s show our appreciation of the wonder of gardens, then let’s try to find photos that might inform our own gardens with ideas we can mimic. Continue Reading →
A Dehiscence of Light – Lesson 1.3
A Dehiscence of Light – Worth Garden
The Wikipedia definition of dehiscence is “the spontaneous opening at maturity of a plant structure, such as a fruit, anther, or sporangium, to release its contents”. Here I present my own dehiscence – of light as I find it in gardens.
As a mature garden photographer (no smirks please), I release some of my favorites as a way to explore visual poetry, while still furthering the mission to teach garden photography with this ebook. Lesson 1.3. Continue Reading →
Composition 102 – Balance
The PhotoBotanic Garden Photography Workshop: 1.2
Our last lesson, the first of the series in my new e-book, and the most important lesson to remember in creating a good garden photo is to fill the frame of your composition with only those elements that contribute to your story. A painter doesn’t waste canvas, a photographer shouldn’t waste space either.
OK, using the entire frame is a given. Every other technique assumes this. Look at any photo in my Gardening Gone Wild posts tagged “The Camera Always Lies” and consider full frames. Now, how do we arrange the elements into a balanced composition? Continue Reading →
