How to take great garden pics
COMPETITION 2023
Jason Ingram is an awardwinning garden photographer who travels widely photographing gardens, plants and people for magazines and books. He also works with garden designers and has provided photography for numerous best-selling gardening books. Jason regularly teaches garden photography courses and lectures about his work. jasoningram.co.uk @jasoningram
Get set up
If using your phone, make sure it’s on its highest resolution for taking images. If using a digital camera, shoot in large jpeg or raw. Make sure your lens is clean – this applies to your phone as well – a lens wipe or soft cloth will do the job. The optimum time to shoot gardens is early morning or late evening, known as the golden hour, when the light is at its softest. If you have to shoot later in the day, make sure you pick a time when there’s high cloud, as this will act as a big, soft diffuser. Shooting your garden in bright sunshine at midday will often produce images that are very contrasty and hard to read.
Choose your subject
When deciding what to shoot, think about the views that make your garden special to you, compositions that have a sense of place. Structure in the garden can often act as a good starting point – these break up the areas of planting and read really well. Plant portraits are lovely but not unique to your garden, so compose wider. Think about the focal points you’ve created and frame your images around these elements.
I often shoot into the light when choosing my subject, as this can add a third dimension
– if you photograph with the light directly behind you, images can often look too flat.
Frame the shot
When you start photographing, think about compositional elements that can draw the eye into the shot, ‘leading’ lines such as a meandering path work well for this. Compose your image and scrutinise the foreground, mid- and background – try to get some separation between these elements. Elevation can sometimes help with this, so using a stepladder can be a good idea.
Good photography is often about what you decide to exclude as much as what you include. Zooming in and out can help you decide what is working, but be aware of the limitations when zooming on a phone. Don’t always frame your subject in the centre – think about the rule of thirds and try placing it in the left or right third of an image, leaving the other two-thirds more open. Turning on the grid view on your camera or phone can help with this.
Your photo collection
Keeping a photographic record of your garden is a great way to see how it develops over time, as well as honing your photographic skills. If you take photos once a month, store the images in a separate folder for each shoot and keep them in chronological order so they’re easy to locate. Adobe Lightroom is great for creating your catalogue, along with making the fine processing tweaks to your images. A little adjustment is often the best approach when you start. Saturation should be kept to a minimum – try to ensure it looks as real to the moment you took the image as possible.