| Garden Shots
Bart Barlow |
Want to capture your own tomatoes and peppers as refreshingly and vividly as these photos? Here’s a couple of tips from Bart Barlow on how to photograph your garden: Light it up “Look at the lighting more than anything else. Even if it’s nothing more elaborate than a candle, or a lantern, or a torch, work at that twilight time with some incandescent or flame-based light source and make kind of a theatrical world out of your garden. Turn it into another land, another landscape. Then—if you’re using a digital camera—review what you’re getting and tweak the lighting accordingly. It will give you a whole new take on your own backyard.” 
“Hay and Sky” © Bart Barlow. Viewing the hay bales as an “ephemeral sculpture park,” Barlow shoots them in all weather and light conditions, because, he says, “in time, it all disappears—as my neighbor hauls them away for his cows to eat.”
Change Perspective “Looking through the camera's viewfinder can help you see your own surrounding in a different way. You might just find a place to stand where a classic composition comes together, like the study in perspective one experiences viewing the reflecting pool and the Washington Monument.” >> “Tomato on Fence Post” © Bart Barlow. The idea of making the tomato into a skyscraper “is supposed to be funny,” says Barlow. “But as any tomato aficionado knows, a tomato is also serious business. I was going for a celebratory picture of the ultimate home-grown ur-tomato of high summer, object of veneration and desire.”
Peppers stacked to resemble a traffic light on Barlow’s farm. “Maybe what I bring to garden photography from the city is almost a sense of the surreal, a sense of the theatrical,” says Barlow. “I will sort of play with elements that are there in the natural world and work them, making them into something else.” “Pepper Traffic Light” © Bart Barlow. |
Change it up “Don’t be afraid to do something in the realm of a site-specific art installation. Change the space for the sake of a photograph. Find something that will work as an interesting prop and insert it into your garden space. You could set up a temporary bamboo pole structure or work with fabric blowing in the wind like Christo. Besides inanimate focal points, you can also use an artfully posed family member, friend, or even pet to draw the eye into the garden composition.” |
