Professional garden photography is quite a closed shop. There is a rather cliquey group of men who do the rounds of Gardens Illustrated, The English Garden, House and Garden and the like. When Eva Nemeth’s name started appearing too, I cheered. She is very much one of us. 

Eva is self-taught and she is a career changer. She took the leap four years ago because she couldn’t not, and look at her now. Who better to help me fall back in love with my camera?

The day was a truly wonderful one. An excellent catch up with Claire from Honeysuckle and Hilda who is one of my favourite people. The Damson Farm garden is still glorious, I think even more so because of the season. The shapes are even softer, the colours even warmer. The trees have not yet turned but there are pumpkins and apples everywhere and that is enough for me. 

Eva covered a lot of information in a day, although the key for me was having a clear hour to just be with my camera (and my tripod). No distractions and no agenda, just looking at the landscape, framing a photo, having the time to check my settings and taking the picture. I should say that these are very much my take homes from the day, everyone would have slightly different….

Aperture priority

I can shoot on manual, but I don’t. I take all my photos on aperture priority. I take a lot of my photos with my lens really open (f-stop between 1.8 and 2.2) which means I can get really lazy about my tripod. Because the lens is really open, the is lots of light coming in and the shutter speed is really fast. I do not have a steady hand but when the photo is taken in a split second, that doesn’t matter. However, garden photography might need a bit more detail. If you want to see more than what is right in front of you, you are going to need to move the f-stop up. Have a look at Andrew Montgomery’s pictures; they are like a still life and you can see all the detail in the foreground and all the detail in the background. You can see everything is perfect sharp detail. His talent for composition means nothing ever looks cluttered, it just looks crisp. 

But if the f-stop is higher, the lens opening is smaller and to get enough light in, the shutter speed is going to be slow. Open – wait – shut. Even if you have a steady hand, anything under 1/125 shutter speed is going to feel you hand shake and get blurry. You have two options, up the ISO (the sensitivity light sensor of the camera) so you don’t need the shutter to be open as long, or get yourself something to rest your camera on. If you are happy with grainier photos, then the ISO route is fine. I am aiming to be the next Andrew Montgomery so I want super-sharp. A tripod it is. 

Actually I took this photo by resting my camera on my teacup, but I would generally suggest a tripod. The dark room and the abundance of light outside made this a bit tricky, but to get the detail on both the screen and the hedge meant an f stop of around 16.

Back in the beautiful kitchen garden, I did whack my f-stop down again, because I just like that sort of look with details. However, either me or the camera picked the wrong raspberry to be in focus and this looks very odd indeed. Generally (and there are some exceptions to this, but not many) it is going to be the feature closest to you that needs to be in sharp focus, and then everything behind it fades into the background. 

Also, gardens are really really hard to photograph if you don’t pick out and focus on a single detail. I talked to Eva about how to get this area look good whilst still capturing all the colours (Dahlia ‘Mexican Chocolate; and Rudbeckia triloba I think). I think having all the detail in just looks so spotty, and so I went back to my low f-stop again. 

 I still find these landscape ones really jumbly and messy, and there are some things that just look messy. This aster is perfectly in focus but the overall look is far from sharp because that’s just what asters look like. 

Lenses

I have two lenses, both second hand that came with my camera. I usually use the one that everyone uses, a 50mm that goes down to f1.8. I lost the lens cap when I went to the National Dahlia Collection almost a year ago and despite having bought four replacements, they never fit and so I go around with a camera without a lens cap on it.

50mm is meant to be the lens that is closest to the human eye in terms of how much of the world that we see at once. Go higher and the field of vision is much narrower, lower and the world is a little bit wider. Think estate agents taking pictures of tiny studio flats in Belsize Park through a fish-eye lens and trying to make it look as if you could fit a bed and a sofa in it. You can always tell though, because if you do it in a confined space, all the lines distort. Amazing for landscapes though. 

In this picture, I tried really hard to get the scale of the landscape but also have the roof straight. Because nothing is more irritating than lines that are meant to be straight being curved…

Get up early. Go to bed late. 

The light. It is all about the light. Inside my house, I can manipulate the light a bit. Not a lot, because it is a cave with tiny windows and I have no south facing anything, but enough to get moody, side-lit Dutch masters’ type of photographs. In the garden, you just need to get up and out into the golden hour.  The warm light that comes in sideways emphasises texture but without hard shadows and flatters people, buildings and gardens alike. I got up early enough to drive to Damson Farm but we didn’t start until 10 so we were long past the golden hour. Luckily the day was an overcast one and so perfect for autumnal photography. I do feel sorry for the wedding photographers who have those intensely hot, blazingly sunny July days*; it is impossible to make anyone look really good in that light, especially people who are wearing white and standing next to someone in a dark suit, or someone in a dark suit standing next to someone in a white dress (just think of the metering). No, what you really want for gorgeous photos is soft light. Bathing light. 

*I feel sorry for the florists too, just for the record. 

This squash. Just enough light to really highlight the curves and give it a bit of a top to bottom contour, but no hard shadows.