April Showers Bring Crabapple Flowers

I have no idea where this crabapple tree in my yard came from; I gather a bird left me a seed and, miraculously, it grew. In fact, it's now the prettiest tree in my yard and is probably about 12' or so tall. I don't know how tall it's going to get, but I'm hoping not too much bigger. (But isn't it fascinating that a single seed dropped by a bird can create a beautiful tree?) It produces zillions of crabapples each year (if you want some, let me know in September!) and though I've seen recipes online for using them in jellies, jams, etc., I've never tried to cook with them. Supposedly they make a nice jelly. But produce aside, it's an extremely pretty and cheerful tree to have in springtime and I'm so glad that I never cut it down. I shot this photo last year, on April 23, so in the next few weeks it should begin to flower again and I can't wait. I just find the white and pink and green color combination extremely cheerful. Isn't it amazing the nice photos you can shoot in your own yard?

Years ago I knew a botany teacher that used to have each student throw a Hula Hoop into a meadow and then the student had to identify every plant and insect within the hoop's circumference. Not surprisingly, sometimes that was a list of a few hundred plants and insects! It might be a good creative photo challenge to do the same thing with your camera and macro lens: toss the hoop and then photograph every thing of interest where it landed. Speaking of which, this past winter I sold my 105mm Micro Nikkor and now regret it deeply. I'll have to rebuy it one of these days...but it may be a while. In the meantime, I'm just thrilled that my garden has flowers once again...and that the ice is finally gone.

Photo notes: Shot with a Nikon D90 with an 18-70mm Nikkor zoom lens; exposed at 1/320 second at f/9, at ISO 200. This is one of the last JPEG images I shot--I now shoot only in RAW.

Photograph Flowers on Cloudy Days

Although we tend to think of gardens and sunshine and photography as going well together, in fact, the best time to photograph most gardens and most flower close-ups is on cloudy--even rainy-days. The problem with shooting on bright sunny days is that, as cheerful as they are, that bright sunlight tends to burn out the highlights of light-colored blossoms and it also creates a lot of contrast. Contrast is one of the toughest things to control in terms of exposure, so the more you can avoid it, the easier your life will be. I photographed this peony blossom in one of my side gardens and it was just starting to rain when I made the photo. A few things pushed me into making the photo at this particular moment: one was that I knew that the blossom was at its peak and that a heavy rain would probably destroy the flower (it did). But also, I'd been watching this plant for days hoping for a great shot, but the light was always so bright that I couldn't hold any detail in the petals. The heavily overcast sky of a rainy day was just what I'd been waiting for and it gave the peony a beautiful rich pink color with a minimal amount of contrast--just perfect conditions.

There are some tricks I could have used if I'd really needed to shoot on a sunny day (like putting a diffusion screen between the flower and the direct sun to soften the light), but I really just wanted a "straight" shot made with no extra gear. That decision was part laziness but also, I was using the picture to illustrate a book for beginning photographers--and they weren't likely to own diffusion screens (or the light stands to hold one), so it seemed more honest to shoot the photo in the simplest way possible. Anyway, even though it was raining when I spotted the blossom, I knew that it was a "now or never" shot and so I hauled out the tripod, set up the camera and shot. Good thing I did--the next morning the blossom was completely misshapen by the pounding rain that came during the night and I would never have gotten the shot. The thing I like most about the picture, ironically, is the soft light of the very heavy overcast skies.

So next time you get a cloudy day, head out to the garden and do some close-up work--you'll be pleasantly surprised at how uniformly nice all of your exposures are and just how much color saturation you get in the flowers.

If You Grow it, Bugs Will Come: Four Lessons

Last summer I had a client that wanted me to take some photographs that included bugs in them. That's a nice request and a fun challenge--but they needed the photos the next day. I thought their request was a bit nuts and never expected to be able to actually find and photograph a bug on command, but I actually completed the assignment--and was even able to give them a choice of bugs--including this green-looking bee (I have no idea what it is). The trick was just sitting in my garden, camera on tripod, and waiting. Low and behold, within about 10 minutes of sitting there staring at some black-eyed Susans, a small moth showed up. Then some bees. Then this green thing.

Even though I've spent most of my life gardening, I guess I never realized just how many bugs hang around gardens--because in the past I either ignored them or was annoyed by them. But suddenly, with an assignment on the line, bugs became my friends. I was able to spend almost an hour photographing this little guy because (lesson number one) he kept coming back to the same flowers over and over. And also, once I set up the camera next to a particular blossom (lesson number two), he (or she) pretty much ignored me.

Later I got even more hip (I'm slow on the uptake sometimes) because once the light fell off of the flowers I was shooting, I picked some flowers, put them in a vase and put the vase on a picnic table in the sun--and, amazingly enough, the bugs followed me. While not as many came to the flowers in the vase, apparently they like the sunlight (lesson number three) because they were ignoring the flowers in the shade in my garden and hanging out with me in the sunlight.

The last lesson for the day was that you should always take on a challenge even if you think you might fail. What's the worst I could have told this client? Sorry, no bugs today? That's not my fault! But as it was they were pleased, I made some cash and the bugs are now famous.

The bugs are waiting for you--so if you're looking for something fun to shoot, go sit out in the garden. By the way, I used a 105mm Micro Nikkor lens and a 20mm extension tube for this shot and I used a small aperture to get some depth of field.

Ajuga Crazy? Don't Mow the Lawn Too Soon!

Well, even though we've only just enjoyed the first day of spring, the sound of lawn mowers has already begun in my neighborhood. Personally I have no idea what the obsession is with mowing lawns (especially in March--when there is snow in the forecast for later this week), but I have some neighbors that apparently think that tall grass is evil and must be mowed at all cost.

But one thing I've noticed over the years is that all sorts of interesting plants grow in most lawns (especially if you don't bomb them with chemicals and if you let the lawns get a bit rangy in spring), including dandelions, violets, grape hyacinth, snowdrops and this lovely blue plant called ajuga (also called bugleweed). Ajuga is actually a very (let me emphasize that, very) invasive plant and at one point a few years ago was taking over my entire front lawn. It has the odd characteristic though of suddenly up and disappearing after several years and that's what it did in my lawn; while I still have some, the lush fields of blue that I was getting (and loving) are gone.

Admittedly having pretty plants like ajuga growing in your lawn can be a pain because they tend to bloom at the same time the lawn is growing at its peak (early spring), so if you want to enjoy the flowers, you have to accept the idea that you'll be mowing much taller grass once the flowers have faded. Also, with invasive plants, if you let them go, they will take off and spread. But for me, having that beautiful carpet of blue in the front lawn, and a carpet of thousands of grape hyacinths in my back lawn (you should see how great the purple looks with the yellow dandelions) is worth the hassle. I complain a lot about mowing the tall after-flowering lawns, but I do get to shoot hundreds of photos.

And that, I guess is my point: if you too have great flowers that bloom in your lawn, why mow them down prematurely just to have short grass? Let's face it, lots of photographers (including me) travel far and wide (Arizona, Texas, California, Nevada) to photograph wildflowers--and then we turn around and mow them in our yards. Don't do it! This year let the grass grow a few weeks before giving it its first haircut and you may be surprised what nice photo subjects you have waiting--right in your own backyard.

By the way, here's a cool book Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community about turning your yard into a food-producing farm instead of a planet-destroying lawn. Pretty as they can be (especially surrounding formal gardens), lawns poison the planet, waste water and produce nothing! Don't poison your yard--eat it!

Step Up to Better Garden Photos

In a previous tip I talked about looking for high vantage points for landscapes and other wide shots, but the idea is just as useful for smaller subjects, particularly garden photos. A few years ago after realizing that I was shooting all of my garden photos from approximately the same height (coincidentally, my eye level), I decided that varying the angle more might add some variety to my shots. I do a lot of garden shots laying on my stomach or my side already, so what was missing was height. I tried some shots with a 6' step ladder and for some shots, particularly wide shots of entire garden beds, that worked fine, but the angle was too steep for closer shots of smaller areas. It looked like a giant had been shooting the photos (though I have shot some photos of my garden from a second-story bedroom window and they look kind of cool).

Next I tried a kitchen stool, just a small white plastic Rubbermaid step stool and it was perfect. Even though it only bought me about another foot of shooting height, the difference in the angle was noticeable and it seemed higher, yet not extreme. Better still, because I was only a foot higher, I was able to use my smaller tripod (a Bogen/Manfrotto 3021). I have a much taller tripod (a Bogen/Manfrotto 3047) but it weighs a lot more and I'm less likely to haul it around the garden. The plastic stool was great and I can throw it in the car for road trips. It makes an excellent platform to get a foot above the crowds at parades or fireworks, etc. Of course, considering the stool only cost about $5 I should probably break down and buy one to keep in the car--I'll have to put it on the next shopping list.

Height is a great thing in composing photos because it provides just enough of a tweak to the composition that people notice the difference without it being an obvious gimmick. Try it!

Follow Graceful Curves in Nature

In the same way that a gently curving path through a forest or field is more interesting to explore than a straight rigid one, a graceful curving line in a photograph is more interesting for the eye to explore. Rather than delivering the eye from one point to another with great efficiency (railroad tracks pointing to the horizon, for example), curved lines entice your eye to wander, to study details along the way at a more leisurely pace and, as Glen Cambell once sang (does anyone remember Glen Cambell?), they are simply more gentle on your mind (actually Glen sang "Gentle on My Mind" but I think we can invoke some poetic license here). Curves invoke feelings of softness, slowness, gracefulness and even safety--you're less likely to fall off a gently curving rock, for example, than a sheer straight cliff.

Nature is a particularly rich source of soft curving lines and you can find them in everything from the human form (some have more curving lines that others, granted) to streams meandering through a meadow to the curve of an ocean beach. Interestingly, curves tend to work best in a photograph when you show only a section of them--as I did with this snippet of a bleeding heart branch. By cropping in on the line a bit you can isolate the most interesting part of the curve and, as with the old show biz adage, you leave the eye wanting more. Rather than photographing the entire curving limb of a saguaro cactus, for example, you might just close in on the elbow and reveal the interesting contrast between the rough texture of the plant and the softness of its shape.

Cultivate Flower Photos, Visit a Botanical Garden

If you like to photograph flowers and plants but don't have the time or room for a garden at home, consider making a trip to a local botanical garden. Even if you do garden a lot at home, you'll get to see things at a botanical garden that most home gardeners could simply never grow and in quantities that are extraordinary. Wherever I travel in the world, in fact, one of the things that I seek out are the local gardens and botanical collections.

Most gardens have two types of displays: formal outdoor gardens and indoor conservatories. Longwood Gardens just south of Philadelphia, for example, has around 1,000 acres of outdoor gardens and more than 4.5 acres of indoor gardens! In fact, the conservatory contains more than 5,500 different types of plants growing in 20 different gardens. Another favorite haunt of mine is the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx and it features 250-acre landscaped acres, 50 curated display gardens, a 50-acre native Forest and more than a million different plants--all waiting to be photographed. I photographed the water lilies shown here at the NYBG in one of several nice reflecting pools behind the main conservatory (I also photographed a family of 11 baby ducks in the same pool).

These are some of the big guns, of course, but I've found wonderful small gardens in places like Corpus Christi, Texas and Tucson, Arizona and I've even got a small but terrific rose garden in a park just up the street from where I live. Wikipedia has a great listing of gardens organized by state and odds are you'll find one that's within a short drive. Don't forget to check YouTube, also, you're sure to find lots of videos of formal gardens and botanical parks.

One other thing that I like about photographing in a botanical garden, by the way, is that they usually have a staff of gardeners who work continually to deadhead old blooms and weed the gardens so that you don't have to worry about a great shot being ruined by a few raggedy blossoms. Even better, you can ask the gardeners lots of questions about how they keep the gardens looking so nice.

Put the Entire Frame to Work

Strangely enough, one of the toughest subjects for me to photograph is my own perennial garden. Part of the problem is that I'm so self-critical of the mess I've made of my garden most years, but also it's just that with so many different things in bloom (especially at this time of year), it's hard to know where to begin shooting. If you try to take in too much the shots get confusing, if you take in too little (a single blossom) you really have to be on your game and it's a lot of work to get a great shot of just one blossom.

The thing I've learned that weakens a lot of my garden shots though is leaving empty space: too much foliage, too few flowers. So I try now to make every corner of the frame do some work--in the exact same way that I try to make every corner of the garden do some work (can you tell I put a lot of demands on my poor flowers?). I try to use the old photography adage that just when you think you're close enough to your subject, take another step forward. For shots like this one to work and for the flowers to each get a prominent role, you really have to squeeze as much as you can into the frame. I love the way the three groups of flowers in this shot (poppies, aliums and Japanese iris) each bring their pocket of color to the shot and all are surrounded by similar green foliage.

The concept of filling the frame to the edges is just as important in other types of subjects, ranging from still lifes to landscapes to architecture. While I appreciate (and use) the beauty of empty space and "negative space" in my shots, I also like the layering and intrigue that are offered by filling the frame to the brim. If you are going to leave emptpy space in a shot though, try to put it along the edges of the frame, that way if you change your mind later you can crop it away. If you leave a big empty space in the middle, you're either going to have a big whole in the center or you'll have to get really good at using the clone tool to fill it up...and I've done that, too, at times but please don't tell anyone.

By the way, I think the best inspiration there is for garden and flower photography are the paintings of Claude Monet, particularly his gardens at Giverny. You can tell from looking at his paintings that Monet struggled with the same concepts of composition: what to leave in, what to take out. It's a battle he obviously won.

Consider the Beauty of the Lowly Dandelion

It's a good thing that I don't take better care of my lawn because if I did I would probably lose all the interesting weeds and wildflowers that grow there. Among my favorite "weeds" are the dandelions that I have by the hundreds in the back lawn. Dandelions may be the scourge of lawn fanatics, but to me they're cheerful and bright and the bunny rabbits love to eat them. And if you've never laid down in the lawn and looked face-to-face with a dandelion, try it--they're amazingly intriticate flowers. Amid the many layers of delicate yellow petals are dozens (if not hundreds) of little curly florets, or tiny flowers. Most people, unfortunately, poison or weed whack them into oblivion before really appreciating them.

Photographing a dandelion is mostly a matter of laying on your face on the lawn and having a camera that lets you focus very closely. I took this shot yesterday while continuing to do test shots with the Nikon D90. I was using a 105mm Micro Nikkor which is an incredibly sharp lens and a great focal length and lets you get very close to small subjects. I realized while shooting this photo, however, how much I wished I was working with a zoom lens. When you're limited to one focal length you have to physically move closer or farther away to change the image (subject) size. While using a prime lens (a single-focal-length lens) is a lot more restrictive because you can't change the composition by simply twisting the lens barrel, it does force you to try to find subjects and compositions that match the focal length. It's an interesting challenge.

I've also photographed dandelions with point-and-shoot digital cameras have have gotten some great photos. Unfortunately some point-and-shoots set the lens to a single focal length once you put it in the macro mode so you have exactly the same issue as with a prime lens: you can't zoom. Still, some point-and-shoots, like my old Olympus C5050 (and I love that camera) let you focus extremely close and there's almost no flower too small to shoot.

Next time you're thinking of killing off the dandelions, grab the camera and take a few mintues to photography it first. I'll write more about close-up photography in the future because it's one of my favorite topics. Taking good close-up photos is really tough work but I do have some good tips to share. By the way, my friend Bryan Peterson has a wonderful new book out called Understanding Close-Up Photography and it's well worth owning. Bryan is one of the world's best photo instructors and writers and I learn something every time I open one of his books.

Lay Down, Look Up

When I first got into digital photography I bought an Olympus C5050 camera that I still own and dearly love. It's a great 5 megapixel camera. One of the things I like about it is that the LCD is partially articulated--in other words, you can pull it away from the back of the camera body and angle it up. One of the many things that this makes it possible to do is to lay the camera on the ground and shoot up at low-lying subjects.

The first summer I had that camera I crawled around on my back lawn and in my gardens looking for things I could shoot up at from ground level. The neighbors must have thought I was nuts (who cares!). One of my favorite subjects for shooting like this are the thousands of grape hyacinths that grow in my yard (I have more flowers than grass in my lawn, trust me). By just laying down with the camera and aiming it up slightly I was able to shoot these tiny flowers (about 4 inches tall) as if they were towering trees. I love the look of them. The articulated LCD isn't necessary, but in this case it just made it a bit easier to see the composition without pushing my face into the lawn.

I have since bought a Canon A650 that has a fully articulated LCD (you can even turn it backwards to you can shoot photos of yourself!) and I still really enjoy that feature. If you're thinking of buying a new point-and-shoot, consider that feature (especially if you're deciding between one camera that has it and one that doesn't). The ability to pull/twist/turn the LCD really has some nice benefits (like shooting over your head and still being able to see the image). But regardless of the camera, next time you're shooting flowers (soon I hope--we're supposed to get 14" of snow this weekend) try laying the camera on the ground and shooting up.

Black Out the Background with Flower Close-ups

You can probably tell by the number of flower and garden related postings lately that my mind is set on spring. I'm so sick of winter! But winter, at least if you live in the northern half of the country, is a good time to cozy up with your monitor and examine last summer's close-up shots to see what you can do to make this year's photos even better.

Among the most common flaws I find in my own close-ups shots are messy backgrounds--backgrounds that are either just too filled with clutter or where lighter objects in the background (grasses, stems, other flower blossoms) are competing too aggressively with the main subject. One way to tame backgrounds, of course, is to use a really selective focus and limited depth of field (near to far focus). Shallow depth of field is an inherent quality of close-ups, but sometimes if the depth is too shallow, your subject is out of focus too. So there are a lot of times when I end up using a small aperture to keep the subject in good focus, but that also brings stuff into focus from the background. A real problem!

The solution? The best solution I've found so far is to use a black background behind my primary subject. You can use a piece of black fabric (try to avoid a shiny fabric) or a piece of black Foam Core board (I spray it with a matte spray to kill any glare spots). Even if you use flash (as I often do) for close-ups and keep the background a few feet behind the subject, the backdrop will still remain jet black. To get this shot of bleeding heart blossoms (isn't it neat they way that you can see the progress of the blossoms opening on just one stem?) I placed a piece of black fabric over a lawn chair and placed the chair about four feet behind the plant. Because I wanted the colors richer and didn't care how "black" the background went, I ended up using a -1 stop exposure compensation setting to saturate the flower a bit.

Speaking of exposure, though, it's important to set your exposure for the flowers and don't let the meter get fooled by all that blackness in the background. If you're shooting by existing light, just meter before you put the backdrop in place. But if you're using flash, and matrix metering (in the Auto or Program modes, for example), the camera will base its exposure on the flash and you will probably get very good exposures automatically.

Shoot Delicate Colors on Cloudy Days

I love to photograph flowers and I have a yard full of gardens so that I don't have to go far to find good subjects. But one of the problems that I often face in photographing flowers (especially light-colored flowers) and that you've probably encountered, is that bright sun tends to burn out the highlights and wash out the colors.

The solution to this problem is one that most professional garden photographers use all the time: work on cloudy days. On overcast days the gentle light quality tends to saturate colors and lowers contrast enough so that you can good a good exposure without the risk of blowing away the highlights and very light tones.

I actually photographed this peony (I wish you could smell it!) blossom just as it started to rain (if you look very close you'll see some raindrops). I had come home from errands and saw the blossom fully opened and knew that once the hard rain started the blossom would fall apart. So, tired as I was, I hauled out the tripod and camera and shot this close-up. I was very pleased with the saturation of the pink tones and the way the soft light quality held detail in even the most delicate tones.

Cloudy days are great for all kinds of subjects, including outdoor portraits, so don't despair if the sun doesn't come out or if clouds pass by, the lighting is just beautiful!

Plant a Butterfly Garden

In yesterday's post I talked about planning your summer garden and as long as we're on that topic, here's another idea: plant a butterfly garden! Butterflies are a great thing to photograph and drawing them to your garden is simple--just plant some of their favorite flowers.

I've had a tremendous success with tithonia (Tithonia roundiflora, or Mexican sunflower, shown here with a Monarch butterfly), a very easy-to-grow annual that grows about 5-6 ft tall and is bright orange. Beautiful! (By the way, there is a relative of tithonia called Bolivian sunflower that reaches up to 16 ft (5 m) tall and is often more than 12 ft (3.6 m) across, that I've never grown but I've read it can be invasive in southern climates, so read more about it before you plant it.) I have also had great luck with buddleia, aka butterfly bush, that is a perennial shrub and attracts butterflies in droves. Others I've had luck with include milkweed, zinnia and (especially in hanging pots) impatients.

There are actually dozens, if not hundreds, of flowers that will attract butterflies and you'll find lots of info on the web. The National Wildlife Federation site has a good basic butterfly primer that talks about both plants and the butterfly's life cycle. And a site called the Milkweed Cafe has a great article about butterfly gardening.

Whatever you plant, remember that insecticides kill both catepillars and butterflies, so don't use them anywhere near your butterfly garden or you'll be killing instead of feeding them! The truth is that I've been gardening since I was a kid and have never used insecticides and never had a problem that I couldn't cure naturally. You don't need insecticides in your garden, you need more insects!

Plan Your Spring Photography Garden

As I write this, my gardens are covered in snow, the temps are in the low 20s (and expected to go below zero by the end of the week) and spring seems a million miles away. But in reality, the first day of spring is only about 10 weeks away and already my mailbox is filling up with garden catalogs--and they save my life every winter!

I spend a lot of winter nights just daydreaming about what plants I'd like to grow and which would be the most interesting to photograph. The bleeding heart shown here, for example, is an incredibly easy-to-grow shade plant but provides one of the most photogenic flowers you'll ever see. And seedlings of this plant are really cheap (under $5) online. Most seed catalogs list literally thousands of flower (and veggie) seeds and it warms my photographer's soul just to look at all of those interesting colors and shapes.

Now is the time to think about some of the plants you'd like to photograph in the coming spring and summer months and to start hunting down good seed and plant catalogs. You can save a lot of money growing your own plants from seeds (or small seedlings bought online) and during the dead of winter many (if not all) online nurseries have substantial sales. The other benefit of starting from seeds is that you'll have a huge variety of potential plants compared to what you'll find in local garden centers.

To get you started, here are a few of my favorite online nurseries.

Plant Delights (biggest hosta seller in the world, lots of tropicals)

Park Seed Company (very high quality seed)

Burpee (the traditional company, many types of seeds)

Johnny's Seeds (that's a direct link to their free catalog)