I’m working on shooting for a new book about gardening east of the Cascade mountains. Since I live on the west side, it means long road trips and concentrated photography to maximize the return on my time and travel expenses. I try to photograph at least a couple of gardens a day, one in the early morning and one in the evening. That’s the fun and creative part of this business.

When I return home then I have to edit and caption the take, which can require almost as much time as the original photography. At this point in 2007 I’ve already created considerably more new images than I did in all of 2006 or 2005, years when I was not shooting a book or doing a lot of travelling.

Many of these new garden images are online on the Inland Northwest Gardening website. The site will continue to grow as I keep shooting and captioning.

One of the challenges of any kind of outdoor photography is dealing with the weather. I’m in the midst of a week-long photography session in the Spokane, Washington area at the moment and nearly froze my fingers off this morning while working in a garden under seriously overcast skies.

This week’s overcast is in strong contrast to the weather I had earlier in May while photographing gardens in the Canadian Okanagan. That week I had one day of partly-cloudy skies (meaning the clouds skittered by, giving alternately sunny and bright overcast conditions) and three days of pure blue sky and bright sunshine.

Ideal weather for garden photography is a bright, high overcast, with enough sun coming through the clouds for soft shadows, but not so much that the contrast between lit and shaded areas is extreme. Unfortunately, it’s not often that I’m blessed with these ideal conditions. I tend to work early in the morning and late in the afternoon for garden landscapes. Mid-day is a good time to take a break and refresh — unless it’s a cloudy day which often means starting later and working during what should be high noon if the sun were out. It’s difficult to predict, and I’ve learned not to completely believe the weatherman.

Sometimes I just have to make do with what I find. Today, that meant waiting around in the morning for the sky to brighten up enough to be worth going out. I had time to read both the Sunday and Monday newspapers while waiting. Then I took an early lunch break when it started raining on me. The light was definitely soft, but with the combinations of plants in the gardens where I was working I was able to make some nice images. It wasn’t quite the light I would have ordered, but it worked.

Late this afternoon I started shooting in a park-like private garden with an incredible collection of Hostas and some nice small conifers. The sun broke through the clouds briefly and I thought I was going to have about three hours of nice light. However, the storm clouds soon rolled back in, the sky darkened, and rain threatened. I packed up and returned to my lodging to wait for another day. Soon after I left the sky opened and a thunderstorm dropped hail, winds picked up to 30 mph, and the temperature plummeted 10 degrees in 30 minutes at the public radio station I was listening to while driving across town.

Spring feels like it’s getting off to a slow start around Bellingham this year. I had to scrape frost of my windshield on Tuesday morning, and high temperatures have remained in the mid-40s. Our daffodils are continuing to look good — a blaze of gold in the corner garden. It must be too cold for the slugs as they haven’t been eating many blossoms this year.

We can go from sun to cloud and back to sun again quickly. The two different kinds of light make for different feelings in a photo of the same subject. On the left, Monday afternoon sun. On the right, Wednesday afternoon cloudy skies. One captures the brilliance of spring in a sunny garden; the other a more mellow feeling under softer light.
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After hauling more rock and more soil and constructing three low stone walls, the result is good. Here’s what one of the three new beds looked like right after the soil was placed and roughly leveled.

Natalie worked for a couple of hours the other evening to start planting the beds. This one got a nice low-growing variegated Ceanothus in the middle. She put bunches of crocus, which had come out to make room for the wall, around some of the edges. There’s still more planting to do, but we’re making progress. We’re thinking of mostly low-growing plants in this bed, with some dwarf conifers in the other two corners. We spent a bunch of money on plants the other day, but still need to do more shopping. We haven’t been plant shopping together for a while, so it’s a fun thing to do. Continue reading →