Playtime at Sunnylands

One thing I enjoy about photographing in gardens is that it can be both challenging and fun. Increasingly, I have been trying to move away from more “traditional” images of flowers or plants towards looking for different ways to photograph them. In a garden I find myself free to play, to experiment, and to try a variety of techniques. So while there are challenges to trying different things, for the most part I just find it is playtime!

Last month I spent part of a morning at Sunnylands Gardens in Rancho Mirage, California. I have visited the gardens a number of times and have shared images in previous posts. At this time of year, very little is in bloom. My objective for this trip was to really try zeroing in on aspects of plants that caught my eye and compose my image around those aspects.

In this first image I really liked the backlighting of the cactus spines in the foreground set against the halos of the cacti in the background.

The following set of images use the interplay of light and small sections of various plants.

Sunnylands has a number of beds of plants set out in a somewhat grid-like pattern. While the pattern and textures of the globular-shaped cacti in one such planting caught my eye, I wanted to try something different with them. So a combination of ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) and cranking the white balance towards blue when processing the image resulted in the somewhat abstract image below.

I knew when I took my final image that it would be a black and white. I wanted to strip the image of color and concentrate on the light, contrast and textures.