Pacific Horticulture’s new monthly photo series by renowned garden photographer and former Pacific Horticulture Board Member, Saxon Holt of PhotoBotanic and Summer-Dry
Winter 2024
When I hike or travel for vacation, usually I only take my camera phone, as was the case when I visited Monet’s garden in France – during tourist hours. Last month in Giverny Part 1 I showed how I composed a picture of tourists on the lily pond bridge, making people part of the story.
As I was standing among the tourists on that bridge I was very conscious of wanting a photo of the lily pads on the pond to remind me of Monet’s inspiration for his marvelous impressionistic paintings. I began looking for a photo:

In these moments it is really fun to have a camera and become a photographer and not a snap shooter. In those moments when you just know there is a photograph somewhere in front of you, allow yourself a few moments to look and study the scene through the viewfinder. Use the frame the actual screen of the camera phone to create a composition. Forget the tourists, enjoy the study, conceive the photo.
You have to want to take a good picture. Spend a few moments looking carefully at the potential photo, compose, and make it happen. It does take some leap of faith to believe that the phone in your hand can actually take a decent picture, but it will – if you have that intention and consciousness.

Standing on that bridge I knew I would need to use the telephoto lens on my iPhone to get closer to the lilypads and I would need to compose very carefully. [You can zoom in for telephoto effect on most camera phones using two fingers on the screen. *More on zooming at the end]
The first two photos are interesting and tell their own stories, but I was intent on making the lilypads more prominent. I zoomed in some more, holding the camera (errr – phone) in front of my face, composing within the frame on the screen. As the Frenchmen around me would have said: Viola!

How did I decide on this exact composition?
As we now know the camera is its own framing tool and the reason it can be so much fun to use it to study a scene, to arrange the various elements in the view finder to tell a precise story. Moving your view a little bit this way or that changes the balance. Study the scene, contemplate the elements. The shapes will come together within the frame.

Once I had this shot I was done. Perhaps I could have stayed in the spot looking for more compositions, and if the light had been great or I was alone in that scene I might have lingered. But I was after all a tourist who wanted to move on and see more.
*[Zooming into a photo with a camera phone can mean significant loss of quality. It is usually a digital process not an optical one. An optical zoom in a traditional camera uses a lens, a telephoto lens to enlarge the scene and save it as a digital file full of pixels corresponding to every point in the photo. A digital zoom comes from cropping the standard lens and reducing the actual pixels in the closer view. Most people don’t notice the loss of quality because the photo stays on the phone for viewing or sharing but for any of you who want to take the camera phones seriously look for the newer models that have separate lenses.]
I began Camera Phones Are Cameras with this full disclosure: I have been a professional garden photographer for 40 years and do not take any of my professional photos with a camera phone. However, almost all the tips I give in my workshops apply to any camera, recognizing the camera is only a tool to capture an image.
It is up to you to take the picture, and if used with intention and consciousness any camera or camera phone can take wonderful pictures; especially if you learn a few techniques.
Resources
For more tips, visit Saxon’s Garden Photography Workshop on PhotoBotanic.com
Visit The Learning Center at PhotoBotanic.com for great books about Garden Photography
Visit PhotoBotanic for more inspiring photographs by Saxon Holt
Learn More About Summer-Dry and Celebrate Plants in Summer-Dry Climates
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