Art from the Garden

First let me define the word “garden.” It’s planet Earth. Well, maybe that’s a little too broad. Let’s say it’s anywhere that something is growing or has grown or will grow. Also anything living or dead that sprang forth from the ground. This blog is all about photographing the wide and macro view of the garden.

While I will offer technical advice, the focus will be the image - without massive amounts of Photoshop touch-ups. My standard equipment is a Nikon D200 camera, a Nikon 17- 35 mm zoom, a 35-70mm with macro, a 70-200 mm zoom and an old Vietnam era 55 macro tough enough to withstand a fall from the top of Liberty One.

That being said, not all the pictures will be made with that equipment. I’ve found that the flatbed scanner makes a pretty good camera. More on that later.

Here are the first two offerings for this week.

The first image is the bottom of a Gerber Daisy floating in water. It was a centerpiece of a friend's wedding and has been on the patio table on my back deck since last weekend. It was backlit by the sun and taken with my old 55 macro, hand held at 1/30 second at f/22. ISO was 100.

The second is an oak tree with the Delaware River in the background. It was taken while I was on assignment at Pennsbury Manor in Morrisville, PA. I used my 17-35 mm set at 1/250 at f /22, ISO 200. I converted it to grayscale in Photoshop then applied a duotone. Pennsbury is a great place for landscape photography. No only are the grounds beautiful and serene but the whole area around Falls Township in Bucks County is packed with lakes and wildlife.

Please let me know if you have any questions about your photography or send your best photos to rtarver@phillynews.com.

No photographer worth a grain of sodium sulfite doesn’t have a box of long forgotten photo trinkets tucked away in an unvisited corner of the basement. You know the stuff: assorted lens caps, a filter that promised to make your photo twinkle with star-like effects, or the mystery cable that attached something to your camera… but what? And now, ever changing technology has made that box bulge a little further with out dated gizmos.

I was digging around in my box a few days ago and happened upon the Izumanon close-up zoom attachment lens. How it got in the box- when I bought it- if I bought it- will remain an resolved mystery. I Googled it and found it all over the place on
e-bay for around $5.00. With my dreams of some fast cash dissolved, I decided to see if it would work with any of my lenses. Amazingly enough, it fit perfectly on the barrel of my ancient 55 macro lens. The combination of the two made possible wonderful extreme close-ups the lens alone could not produce.

Luckily, for the last few weeks the Mountain Laurel bush in the front of my house has put on an amazing display of softball sized clusters of tiny white flowers, with each flower measuring around an inch. When they started to fall they looked like hundreds of shrunken sombreros scattered along the sidewalk. They are all turning brown now,but even in their decay there is a beauty, and they made perfect specimens for my newly found equipment.

Its funny in this age of high-priced and complicated do-dads that there are cheap and simple alternatives. Maybe you should go box- diving in your basement. You never know what you might find.

Here are a few of the images made with the attachment, along with a photo of the set-up.

All the images were backlit using a light box. As a general rule of thumb for macro photography, it’s best to use the smallest aperture possible for sharpness and detail. Doing so will require a longer shutter. If the shutter goes below 1/60 of a second it’s best to use a tripod. But I wanted a more ethereal effect so I shot it at f/3.5, the largest aperture on my macro, which provided almost no depth of field. I’m not sure what effect the lens attachment has on the lens concerning reductions in aperture. In the old days, with film, this was critical information. But now I use the digital display to view the image. When it looks right I go with it. The final settings for this images is F/3.5 at 1 second.



I pulled off one flower and found a wonderful star shaped pattern left from the stem. This shot was made by over exposing about 2 stops at f/22 at ½ second.

I made several shots of fresh flowers but found this photograph of a withering flower more poignant. The setting was f/22 at 1.5 seconds.

Finally, the lens attachment pulled into detail the tiny stamens of this flower. Each stamen was less that 1/8 inch with an exposure of f/22 at 2 sec. A tripod and camera release cable was crucial in making this image.

If you’re inclined to think that the garden is a quiet content place to kick up your heels and dream away the day, take a look at Linda Hackett’s photograph, Allum giganteum, on display at the Delaware Art Museum in the exhibition "Contemporary Photography and the Garden -Deceits and Fantasies," on view through September 1, 2007. Its vision of a Dr. Seuss world gone wrong conjures up an otherworldly view of the garden. Actually it’s a photograph of the flower taken with a pinhole camera.

Then there’s British artist Marc Quinn’s floralscape with its garish colors and depictions of perfect--albeit frozen--flowers. Quinn can’t really be defined exclusively as a photographer. One of his most notable works is a frozen bust of himself - made from his own blood. He used a similar technique to create Italian Landscape #3 in which he arranged flowers that otherwise would never be found together in nature, then froze them with liquid nitrogen, thus preserving their brilliant colors, at least until the machinery that kept them that way is turned off.

His image reminds us of a pre-911 world where beauty was only skin deep and technology was the salvation of all of our problems. But before you invest in a cryogenic machine, consider one of Sally Mann’s ghostly images from Las Pozas, Mexico- - all created with a broken lens attached to her view camera.

By contrast, Lynn Geesaman’s work shows a world in perfect order. The human touch is all too obvious in her landscapes of meticulously quaffed topiary. In her image, Hedge, Knightshayes Court, Devon, England, the world is in symmetry. Everything is balanced. Look very closely at the image and you’ll see extreme detail in a seemingly hazy print. She manipulates sharply focused negatives in the darkroom to give her work a 19th century quality.

Garden photography as subject matter for art photographers waned after the photo secession movement in the early 20th century, but had resurgence in the 1980’s and 90’s. Partly, according to Heather Campbell Coyle, associate curator of the Delaware Art Museum, when artists began to react to the environmental movement.

“Because gardens are works of art, designed with their own vistas and points of interest, it’s surprisingly difficult to take an interesting photograph of a garden—to create something evocative or atmospheric that goes beyond replicating the garden itself,” said Coyle. “These photographers have produced striking images that honor the beauty of their garden subjects, while creating something independent of them.”

The museum is offering a second exhibition entitled " The Cultivated Eye—Brandywine Valley Photographers," featuring the works of artists from the region including Alida Fish, Lisa Tyson Ennis, and Jim Graham. On display through October 21, the 39 works in this show display a wide range of responses to the natural world and a variety of approaches to the medium of photography.

Combined, the shows bring together some of the most visionary local, national, and international artists to redefine the garden in surprising ways. These are must see exhibitions for anyone interested in photography,and those willing to be shocked a bit by what lies beyond their petunias.