Photography 101: Meet the Garden. . .!

Years ago my husband took a certificate course in Commercial Photography.  The very first assignment was to shoot an entire roll of film, but to limit the photos to what he could see in a random 10-foot-square area in our own backyard. That exercise proved to be a life-changer. To this day, he is one of the few art photographers I know who can make a row of pastel-colored porta-potties seem beautiful.  It makes a guy wonder how much of our time is spent chasing the exotic and novel and exciting and different, often at the cost of great time, effort and expense. Meanwhile, we miss that fascinating gem right there at our fingertips. With that life-discipline in mind, I took my point-and-shoot to the garden today.  Yesterday there were mostly leaves in a lot of the beds.  From one day to the next, I found myself caught up with non-stop buds and budding.  My lens sought out the graceful, drooping stems of the hardy geranium. The gaudy red-orange Oriental poppy starts out like a golf-ball-sized flower head,  bursting out of a thick and spiny skin.  Peony buds emerge as red-veined marbles at the heart of a leaf cluster.  When in the bud stage my personal favorite, the alium, betrays its onion-like origins.  But ah, the wild fireworks display that follows. Like that photography assignment, the garden becomes a frame through which we learn that simply “looking” isn’t always “seeing”.