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Ten tips to improving your garden and plant photography, most of which applies to any form of photography of course. Most should also be fairly obvious, but its is just too easy to forget those:
1. Get out there
Go take some pictures! You can read all you want, but reading about photography will not make great pictures. You must get out there and take some pictures, and do it as often as conditions allow. You do not have to take as many pictures as possible, but take the time to think about the picture and practice your approach to turning the vision into a real picture. Experiment so you intuitively know what to do when confronted by the best view you have ever seen, the best bloom or the best planting combination. If you have your own garden practice. Get outside, irrespective of the season or weather and take some pictures. Move around, look from different angles and perspectives, take pictures!
2. Know your gear
Become intimate with every piece of gear you have. That means being able to operate and adjust it without looking at it. If you must, try with the lights off, but become one with the camera, lenses and any other accessories you find essential to your own photography. Never, ever, go to a shoot without trying the new piece of equipment and be able to operate it instinctively.
3. Look around
Read photography books, look at gardening and plant portraits and monographs, online blogs and portfolios. Be a voracious reader and read as much as you can - but do it when there's no light to photograph by! Look really critically at other people's images - on-line and in print. Develop your own understanding of what looks great and what doesn't, then look at the pictures again to decide why they look great or not. Look at them to see how things are lit, how depth is included in the picture, how close the camera is to the subject, what angle of view, how the frame is filled. Develop your own understanding of what makes a picture great and how you will apply that to your own photographs.
4. Study your subject
Read everything you can about the subject. Learn about it and get to understand it. The more you know the easier it will be to appreciate, see what is important and cut out the things that do not matter.
5. Be passionate
Learn to look at things, learn to see. Don't just look at things to treat everything as something worth documenting, but look with a passion - what is it that moves you? What do you like about what you see? Good technique will create loads of pictures that record the moment and the subject, but that alone will rarely create great pictures that stimulates the senses or move the viewer to express opinion. A great picture provides stimulation, it moves people and wakes up senses. When you look at things don't just look, see what's there. Then learn to capture that in a picture.
6. Review the old stuff and do some weeding
Periodically review your picture library, you never know what you might find! Be critical and ask yourself how the picture might be improved. What would you have done in hindsight to make that picture better? Also don’t be afraid to delete some of the pictures that really do not cut it. Weed out the weak images and let the stronger ones dominate!
7. Show your work
There is little point in hiding all your work. And if you create great pictures it is not fair to keep them hidden. Show them off! If nothing else you will get feedback on whether others like them or not and develop an understanding of what others like or not as the case may be. Any feedback will help improve the quality of your work and help to create more great pictures. Show them to friends and family, display on-line using websites such as Flickr, enter competitions, join a discussion forum and seek feedback, put out a photoblog or web based gallery and make it known. Then listen to the feedback, even if its not what you wanted to hear.
8. Take a break
Do something different - if photographing plants is what you do, go and do something different to avoid getting stuck in a creative rut or always doing things the same way. It maybe that your current approach is successful, but one day it might not be and you'll need to so something different. Try out other approaches to your subject and try out other subjects. Think about what makes great pictures and apply that to what you do. You will be surprised how much can be transferred from landscapes to gardens, for instance, or how lighting people can tell you things about lighting a plant to show its best.
9. Write it down
A few decades ago I had to revise for school examinations. Part of my technique to swot up was to read all my previous work, but what made a lot of it stick and get me through was writing it down. Mostly in note form and always scruffy, but the very act of recalling things and writing them down helped me cement my understanding of the many subjects I had to study and pass. Several decades later, surprising enough, the same approach still works and can be very effective to organise thoughts and make sense of what I have learnt. Some of this I publish, but most of it remains lurking on my laptop hard disk. It doesn't have to be published to help - and most is probably not wort
h publishing anyway. It also doesn't need to be written down on a computer as traditional methods (paper!) are still excellent. Some of my most insightful notes are written on scraps of paper, notepads and sticky notes. The challenge then is storing them efficiently - but that's not for this discussion! But write down, in notes, doodles or whatever works for you, what you have learnt. The thinking and analysis process that you go through to write it down is the bit that matters, but how many times have you come to that eureka moment and not noted it, only to struggle to remember it later?
10. Simplify
Your composition, your gear and your technique. Rid yourself of complexity and clutter so you can concentrate on the pieces that matter. Get closer to the subject, physically and emotionally to better connect and feel the picture. Do not let a large camera bag of equipment weigh you down and learn to use each piece of gear and understand what it does for the picture. Leave it behind if it does not genuinely help. Do not let the complexity and “features” of your camera burden your photography - find your favourite settings and stick with them, only adjusting what’s necessary when really necessary. Become one with the camera and any equipment so using it is instinctive and not reaching for the manual every time you need to change something!
Finally, and above all else, enjoy it.
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