Gardens by TJ

Having had a break from Two Views I thought photographing gardens in the spring with all the colours would be a simple task... Oops got that wrong for starters! I always wanted to get a photo of something with a personal touch to it rather than take the big stately garden route, although I was considering visit a National Trust property at one stage. I had 2 gardens to choose from, the first being my own tiny garden out the back of my terrace property in Reading, and secondly my mothers more sizeable garden in Maidenhead. Initially I had almost discounted my own garden as I couldn't see how anything there would be interesting to photograph or even be interesting to the viewers out there in blog land! But then I took the advice from a link on the "Gardens" page we posted, and I spent time in the garden both looking hard at what was there and getting a feel as to what I could photograph. The end result is the rose, which is currently in full bloom and has been in my garden for 5 years or so now since I got three rose plants as a present for helping one of mum's friends with a computer problem. I used the macro setting on my camera to get right up into the rose whilst keeping the whole of the flower in bud in shot. The original photo is in my "almost" shots below and you can see what a gorgeous yellow it is. The effect in editing was achieved by using a low brightness and very high contrast setting with the photo being converted to black and white for added effect. In fact the reason why I decided to go with black and white was for garden photography that was probably on the last things expected with all the colours on display at the moment. But for me the contrast between light and dark is beautiful, and on a personal note with my mother winning a bowel cancer battle this week and the anniversary of my father's passing it just seemed right in quite a poignant and emotional period.

The other photos I considered using apart from the rose top left was a shot of the vegetable patch in my mum's back garden top right. This was interesting as I wanted to capture a snapshot of time, with the old shed my dad built over 40 years ago in the background and my mother's unique approach at keeping up dad's vegetable patch including her windmills to keep the pigeons at bay in the foreground. Bottom right the red flowers in mum's garden were lovely, but just too bright and believe me they even look like this to the naked eye! The animals bottom left are tucked away in mum's garden and I love them, but just couldn't get them to quite pose right for me!