ABOVE: Garden furniture often presents photographic opportunities. Here, in the walled garden of a hotel in the Cotswolds, a garden chair is snugly framed with ferns and climbing roses. EOS 5DS R, EF 50mm f2.5 Macro lens, 3.2 seconds at f14, ISO 200.
I also make a point of seeking out the many smaller private gardens which open up to the public as part of the National Garden Scheme where you may often find garden photography’s hidden gems.
These small gardens help to demonstrate that gardens don’t have to be on the scale of a Chatsworth to offer plenty of creative opportunities. You can make great garden pictures out of an urban allotment, an inner city balcony or even a humble window box.
Shooting with simple kit
You don’t necessarily need to tote around an enormous bag of expensive kit. You can do an awful lot with just one lens, such as the excellent EF 24-70mm f4L IS USM (cheaper and lighter than the f2.8 version) or, for a bit more reach and some limited macro capability, the EF 24-105mm f4L IS II USM. If you choose to go the prime lens route, the EF 35mm f2, EF 50mm f1.8 II and EF 100mm f2.8L IS Macro USM are excellent choices, which will work very well for you over a wide range of photographic genres. These are not particularly fast lenses, but one of the advantages of garden photography is that you are not really going to need superfast lenses.
If you want to save some more money you can even opt for the pre-IS versions of the above lenses, as you are likely to be using a tripod a lot of the time. If you don’t want to carry around a heavy tripod, in good lighting conditions a simple monopod fitted with a lightweight ball and socket head could be enough to ensure you get everything in the picture tack sharp.
I shoot with the 50-megapixel EOS 5DS R, but Canon’s mirrorless offerings, such as EOS R5 or R6, are hard to beat in terms of full-frame portability.
