The past weekend was a bank holiday weekend here and while it was blog-free for me, it wasn’t entirely a photo-free weekend. Truth be told I had higher photo expectations for the weekend than it delivered, with the Maritime Festival at the Docklands proving not to have as many tall ships as I had hoped, but Bloom in the Park (a bit like the Irish version of the Chelsea Flower Show) offered a few more photographic opportunities.
It would have been better had I not arrived at Bloom at the peak of Saturday afternoon as it was very very busy, and that limited me to taking a minimum of photographs as our walk around the show gardens and food tents was being slowed enough as it was without me constantly stopping to take pictures. I did take a few however – 28 to be exact – from which I’ve picked a few to show here today and tomorrow.
To start today, the photograph at the top of this post was a self-assigned exercise in composition. The garden, like others on show, seemed to be all about structure and form, so it seemed appropriate to take time and care to pay attention to those elements when photographing it also. I therefore was careful to position the camera at a height and angle that kept the vertical lines and horizontal lines reasonably vertical and horizontal. I framed so that the stone kerbing at the edge of the grass led the eye in, while the relative positions in the frame of the three water outlets that feed the stone-bottomed pond (and how they intersect with each other) is no accident either.
My final creative touch for the photograph was to do something a little less obvious with how I presented it by opting for a shallow depth of field to effectively throw what should be the subject – the garden – out of focus, and instead bring the flowers in the foreground to the viewer’s immediate attention. The more obvious way to photograph the garden would have been to go to f/16 or even f/22 with my aperture and keep the entire garden from front to back in focus – and this I did too – but having then tried the other extreme of a wide f/2.8 aperture, I felt this variant offered more in terms of something to hold the eye.
I should mention too that I flipped the end result horizontally – if you had seen the garden at Bloom yourself it was the other way around. Why? Mainly because I was aware that the “Technical Information” overlay above would obscure the flowers that I so carefully made the focal point, but also because the shot just sits better for me “looking” to the right, as I feel this does.
Recent Comments