Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 10:45AM The view outside my office window might not be as picturesque as this shot in the Wills Perennial Garden at Cheekwood Botanical Garden in Nashville, but I love seeing all the "spring greens" of new leaves on trees.
Photo ©2007 Lee Anne White. All rights reserved. Taken at Cheekwood Botanical Garden, Nashville.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009 at 6:45AM Robin and Paul Cowley's Oakland garden will be featured on the 2009 Ups & Downs of Hillside Gardening Tour on April 18-19. This stunning garden features an assortment of water features--from simple basins and bubbling fountains to a naturalistic koi pod and an ingeniuos bog with floating steps. Paul is a landscape architect and owner of Potomac Waterworks, a firm specializing in the design and construction of water features. Robin is a talented fiber artist, whose eye for texture is evident in the garden's plantings. Together, they have created a garden filled with imagination and ideas. Their home and studios will also be on tour.
Tour hours are Saturday, April 18, from 11 am - 4 pm, and Sunday, April 19, from 10 am - 5 pm. There are eight gardens on the tour, which benefits the Hillside Gardeners of Montclair. For ticket information, call 510-530-1681 or email HgmGardens@gmail.com.
All photos ©2007 Lee Anne White. All rights reserved. Garden design: Paul & Robin Cowley, Oakland, CA.
Monday, April 6, 2009 at 8:47PM 
Anyone can take a photograph of a beautiful garden. But taking a beautiful photograph of a garden requires a different thought process. You have to “see” the garden in a different way—to know what compels you, how to compose it so that it works visually within the camera’s frame, and how the camera translates the light falling on that subject. Here are a few tips to help along the way:
1. Seek out well-designed gardens. Although it’s quite possible to take lovely photographs (particularly details) in any garden, in a well-designed and carefully tended garden you can take cues from the design itself when composing your images. In a well-designed garden, there are fewer distractions and more subjects to choose from.
2. Simplify your composition. Gardens, by their very nature, are extremely busy. Just look at all those leaves, flowers and branches! Also, gardeners tend to accessorize their gardens. As a general rule, you get the best shots when you move in a little closer and edit out everything that isn’t essential to the image.
3. Shoot in soft light. That usually means shooting in the early morning light, evening light and on lightly overcast days. Sunrise is my favorite time in the garden, but long days with thin overhead clouds are a blessing to the working garden photographer. Without cloud cover, mid-day light is too harsh and flat for most garden photography.
4. Start with broad overviews to set the stage and to give a sense of perspective. Then move in closer to capture vignettes—the focal points, passageways and destinations in the garden. Showcase the design in the garden—the colors, patterns, form, repetition and texture. And finally, seek out the details that give the garden character—the plant combinations or collections, unique materials, and construction details.
5. Avoid bright spots. Whether it’s a stray white flower, a white chair, a reflection or a washed-out sky, bright spots can ruin an otherwise wonderful photograph because the brightest spot in a photograph is where the eye will settle.
6. Explore your subject from all angles. Too often, we shoot from eye level because we’re simply standing there enthralled with a garden. But get down low; look for a balcony or deck you might shoot from; walk around your subject and see what the other side looks like. Also try looking at your subject through different lenses. A plant combination looks very different when shot with wide angle and telephoto lenses.
7. Use a tripod. If you want to shoot in soft, low light or have tack-sharp images with good depth-of-field, a tripod will greatly improve your success rate. Using a tripod also forces you to slow down and contemplate your composition. (That said, it could also stifle your creativity if you can’t easily remove the camera to look at your subject from different positions, so make sure you have a quick-release plate.)
8. Look around the edges of your viewfinder. This is a good practice no matter what you photograph. Often, we are so focused on what we see in the center of the frame that we miss a distracting limb or leaf that is creeping in from the side.
9. Watch your depth of field closely. I frequently “shoot the extremes” in the garden—either a wide view at f16-22 or zoomed in close at f2-4.5—but a depth-of-field preview button is invaluable when photographing plants. It allows you to adjust the depth-of-field so that the flowers or other important elements are sharp and the background is thrown out of focus so as not to be distracting.
10. Use a polarizing filter to knock out reflections and saturate colors. I don’t shoot with the polarizer unless I need it, but it is extremely helpful for knocking the glare off glossy-leaved plants, saturating colors on lightly overcast days, and eliminating reflections on water, glass and metal. If you have blue skies with puffy white clouds in your photograph, it will help those clouds “pop” in your image and saturate the sky.
For more information or instruction on garden photography, click here for workshop information.
Photos ©2008 Lee Anne White. All rights reserved. Designer Credits (top to bottom): Container garden at Atlanta Botanical Garden, Robinson Garden by Ben Page, Jr., Colocasia 'Illustris' in border by Pam Baggett, grasses at Chicago Botanic Garden by Oehme van Sweden Landscape Architects.
garden, photography, tips in Garden Photography, Photography Friday, April 3, 2009 at 11:01PM 
Workshops—both taking them and teaching them—have been wonderful experiences for me. Beyond personal projects, my work has evolved the most—both in terms of craft and vision—as a result of workshops. It is a week of total emersion, of shooting, of learning from and sharing with others, of having your work critiqued, of being constantly challenged.
Here’s why I believe in workshops:
• There is an unrivaled intensity to the week and total immersion into your craft. There are no distractions: You don’t call home. You don’t think about your job. You eat, breathe and live photography (or bookmaking or whatever) with other artists for a full week. You can’t help but learn, be challenged, and be energized in that kind of setting.
• You get feedback on your work from people whose opinions you trust.
• You try things you might never try otherwise. You push beyond your comfort zone, but within a safe and supportive environment.
The key is choosing the right workshop. If you need to advance your skills, take a skills-based workshop from an experienced teacher. If you’re feeling stale, consider a destination workshop to a place you’ve never been before. If you’re looking to advance your career, seek out a workshop that will challenge you intellectually. Look for instructors whose work you admire and who have received rave reviews about their interaction with students.
And then go with two things:
1. A short list of personal objectives for the workshop.
2. And an open mind.
Photo taken in the Red Mountains of southern Colorado during a workshop conducted by the Rocky Mountain School of Photography.
Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 9:19AM 
Stock photos of inviting outdoor living areas, inspired garden design and innovative landscape architecture are as close as your fingertips. I am pleased to announce that my new, searchable stock photo collection is now online. [Click on Image Archive in the blog navigation bar or Search Stock from my portfolio menu, or add www.leeannewhiteimages.com to you favorite bookmarks.]
This new site includes many of the features of my old site, as well as a few new ones. In addition to searching by keyword (still the quickest and easiest method), you can also browse major categories for images. And you can still create, save and send lightboxes to your editor, art director, photo editor or author. It’s easy to request a custom quote and invoicing is still available.
At the new site, you’ll find lots of new images in addition to old favorites. Images from dozens of recently photographed and previously unpublished projects from top pool designers, landscape architects and gardeners are featured. New work is being uploaded on an ongoing basis and additional images (digital and film) are available offline—so be sure to let me know if you don’t immediately find what you’re looking for. My goal is to make your job as easy as possible—to deliver visually fresh, high-quality images on time and on budget. If you would prefer to send a stock needs list, I’ll be glad to handle the search for you and send either light boxes or a CD of images for review.
Special image collections include:
• Outdoor kitchens and dining areas
• Pools and spas
• Patios, terraces and outdoor hearths
• Water features
• Private gardens
• Container gardens
• Plants and gardening
In addition to stock photography, I have also included a new collection of fine art photographs available as prints. These include color seascapes from The Mutable Sea series, as well as intimate black-and-white portraits of the southern Sea Islands.
Enjoy browsing!
Photos ©2007 Lee Anne White. Design credits: (top) Clemens & Associates, Inc., Santa Fe; (bottom) Robin & Paul Cowley, Potomac Waterworks, Oakland, CA.