Poppy Perspective

I am delighted to have another Better Photos with Any Camera workshop at Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, a wonderland dedicated to California native plants.

To take better photos, understand what you are seeing and let the camera tell that story.  There are many stories to tell when you are in the middle of a beautiful garden and it is easy to get overwhelmed – and too easy to just grab a snapshot.

Find a perspective, both figuratively for your storytelling, and physically for your camera, that tells the story of what you really see.

The big meadow just inside the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden is full of poppies in spring and is one of the most delightful places imaginable to spend time with a camera, playing with the many ways to interpret the poppies flowering exuberantly among other plants.

Here I composed a mass of flowers and framed the upper corners of the photo with shrubs to help show the scale and the setting

There is a big rock towering over the meadow that is just barely visible in the tip of the photo.  So another perspective of the poppies shows the rock dominating the frame.

It is still a poppy picture, but a different perspective.

Seeing some dark areas in the distance gives me the opportunity to get really low for a full frontal perspective, now framing the poppy was if it were a study for a botanic illustration.

Any of this photos could have been taken with any camera.  It is up to the photographer, to decide what story to tell.

This workshops April 10, more worshops are found the Workshops page and all use lessons from the award winning ebook Good Garden Photography.