How to Take French Garden Landscaping Pictures
Photography appears to be a very simple visual art. Still there is a world of difference between a great photograph and a mediocre snapshot. Even so, by learning a few simple techniques, it is possible to come up with an imaginative image that evokes the atmosphere of a French Impressionist Landscape. This will involve a physical search for a natural setting that evokes the concept of a French garden.
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Instructions
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How To Take French Garden Landscaping Pictures
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Go out and find a garden, where you can take your camera and make some pictures. If you are lucky you might live near a popular public garden, where visitors are willing to pay an entrance fee just to walk through the rows of domesticated plants and trees. However, finding a big fancy garden is not crucial, for you might have a small plot of soil in your backyard that might suffice. Or maybe you have a friend or neighbor that has a very green thumb. Anyway your first order of business is to find an appropriate place, where you can take some pictures with your camera. If you are the kind of person that likes the great outdoors, then you might search out a placid pond that is covered in water lilies. The possibilities are many.
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Go to your particular locale that provides some interesting garden scenery and take some pictures. Don’t worry about the sky. Just shoot the plant life, or you can leave a sliver of sky at the top of the frame. Also, if possible bracket your pictures. That means for each spot that you take an image, be sure to vary the exposure time. What you are interested in is getting a picture that is half stop or whole stop over-exposed. This will result in a moody atmosphere that can simulate something like a French garden in an Impressionist painting.
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Search the foreground for some interesting ideas that can become the main point of interest for the photograph. This could be a pond, a patch of flowers or a garden path. Take some more pictures with one of these items as the focal point. Don’t forget to bracket each shot. An alternative would be to set up a still life right in the middle of the garden. This may not be possible in a large public arboretum, but this would be a great idea for your neighbor’s garden or your own backyard.
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(optional)Put your picture into a Photoshop program to create special effects that enhance the idea of a French Garden Landscape. I will be brief here, for the creative possibilities in Photoshop are vast. There are two places that I would go to in Photoshop to experiment, and by the way the cheaper version of Photoshop (Elements) works perfectly well for this. Once you open Photoshop go to “Enhance”, where you can work with the lighting and color balance. If you go to the “brightness” option and then to “levels”, you can then adjust the color levels until you find a hue or color balance that you like. Or you can search all the filter effects for an appropriate choice, such as watercolor or grain texture.
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Tips & Warnings
The type of camera that you use is not as important as one might think. The important part is the search for the best location from where you can make the picture.
ask permission before photographing a garden on private property
