Jul 15

Jul 15 A Walk in the Garden

There's a beautiful walled garden in the park near where I live. The park itself, Dublin's Marley Park, is a former stately home and grounds, and it's kept its walled garden which is now open to the public. As well as an array of flowers and plants, it's also home to a garden school and has lots of herbs and vegetables on show too. As with all gardens it's a constantly changing and beautiful living entity in and of itself, and i love going there to photograph.

This wasn't actually a planned trip and we just happened to be in the park and decided to stop in to the garden. We had actually been a month ago and I was amazed at how much it had changed in that short space of time. There was lots of lavender in full bloom and the vegetable and herb patches were fully grown too. The garden also has some birds including foul (hens and roosters mostly) was well as some exotic birds including some baby peacocks.

The weather was slightly overcast, which is actually ideal conditions for photographing flowers and such things. You effectively get a nice giant soft box lighting your subject for you. Gear wise, I shot these on my Nikon D700 which s my favourite camera for shooting nature, because I love Nikon greens, and I love the lovely smooth tones the D700 produces. Post processing wise, I tried to not do too much to these because they were pretty much perfect straight out of the camera. I did some minor tweaks to contrast, and brightness etc in Lightroom, with some vignetting here and there. One of the things that I found to be really effective too, was a little touch of Lightroom's new de-haze slider really enhances the greens.