A Welkinweir Perspective: Photo Walk

Saturday I had the opportunity to walk the grounds with two skilled photographers to get tips on how to improve my own photography. I learned a little about light and got to experiment with a diffuser. It was early in the morning so the sun was backlighting the flowers and making them glow. I am far from being a professional photographer, but I learned a few things about what makes a photo and what breaks a photo, and I will share a few of those tips with you.

The picture on the left is superior to the picture on the right, but can you determine why? One of the elements of good photography is using light to your advantage. In the picture on the right, the light is so bright that is has detracted from the subject of the photo: the orange azalea. It becomes a distraction. The sharp contrast of light and dark, or distracting bright spots in images, can be softened with a light diffuser.

Another way to control light in a photo is to adjust the exposure compensation manually on the camera. This will work to darken the background to keep it from distracting from the subject of the photo, which in this case is the pink azalea.

Because I take pictures of flowers all the time for this blog, I wanted to try photographing something else.

Cercis canadensis 'Silver Cloud'

Sometimes stark contrast contributes to the photo.

Cercis canadensis 'Forest Pansy'

The only difference between these two photos is a little Photoshop tone adjustment. The photo on the left was too washed out. Rather than take 15 pictures trying to get the lighting right, I took 15 seconds to edit it in Photoshop. Another example of how a little contrast makes a photo.

Chionanthus virginicus, white fringetree

I like the photo on the left better. Why? I don't know the answer to this one. Usually I don't like blurred photos, especially when that wasn't my intention. I can just imagine the flowers fluttering in the wind.

I spent a lot of time under this fern leaf beech, trying to get the perfect picture. I think there was more than one right way to do this. In the pictures above, I focused on a single leaf. The picture on the right is probably better because it minimized some of the distraction of the surrounding leaves.

In the next two pictures, I let the blue sky show a little more, and tried to offset the photo a little so the eye was drawn somewhere besides right to the middle of the picture. These pictures work because the blue and green compliment each other.

I tried again with Acer palmatum 'Butterfly'. The top two pictures have too much distracting light and branches in them. The bottom two portray the delicate, variegated leaves as I intended.

If at first you don't succeed, click, click again.

This is an example of how not to photograph a hosta...

Sometimes I just have to admit defeat. A diffuser would have helped in the picture on the right. And if someone would cut down that large and distracting tree trunk...

'June' was more fun to photograph. I spent several minutes there because the light kept changing and the leaves looked like watercolor.

The oakleaf hydrangea nearby, Hydrangea quercifolia 'Little Honey', complimented the yellow in the hosta nicely, so I snapped way too many pictures of that as well.