My carrot crop

One thing I love about having a vegetable patch is, that at the end of the winter, when not much is happening in the garden, I still have some remaining crops of vegetables to harvest. This year I have an abundance of carrots and leeks, and what’s left of the kale the slugs have gotten to.

However when I dug up some carrots for a chowder last weekend, I discovered that I had obviously planted this crop in an area full of flints, which made for an interesting array of shapes. Below are photos of this years carrots as oppose to last year’s crop.  They still tasted delicious.

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Carrots

Garden Photography Tutorials

 

Some weeks ago I was asked by garden bloggers Alexandra Campbell and Amicia de Moubray, if I would do a couple of photography tutorials for them, so they could improve their skills with their cameras and take better garden photos for their respective blogs.

After mulling over our camera manuals, graphs and colour charts indoors with a coffee or a delicious bowl of soup, we would venture out into the winter sunshine to do some photos, or try our hands at some stillife techniques indoors. Afterward we would evaluate our work, and find out how useful mistakes are to learn how to do it correctly.

I hope Amicia and Alexandra took away some helpful hints on sometimes difficult and complex technical jargon; but more so the notion, that taking a photograph is more than just pointing your camera at a beautiful plant or landscape, but to stop and see and capture the essence of how light reflects off an object and makes a pleasing image.

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Here is a link to an interesting blog post about one of the topics of our tutorials “How to photograph Snowdrops” The Middle Sized Garden Blog

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The Lady’s Gardening Column

Throughout the whole of 2015 I worked with garden columnist Sarah Langton Lockton on her gardening column for The Lady Magazine, documenting the development of her newly designed garden. She inherited a rather overgrown neglected town garden, when she moved to her new home in Faversham, and with the help of garden designer Posy Gentles restored and recreated the space. The result is beautiful.

It was a great pleasure working with Sarah on this project. Every few weeks she would invite me over to make a photographic record of her newly dug beds, pruned and restored trees, plant additions, landscaping ideas, greenhouse constructions and vegetable plots. We always had a lovely chat about the changes and additions, and often I walked away with a cutting from a beautiful plant or a tasty homegrown fruit or vegetable.

Here are some of the columns we worked on together throughout the year.

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My harvest 2015

Growing your own fruit and vegetables is so rewarding and enjoyable. This year I had so many apples, pears, berries of all descriptions, cherries, squashes, pumpkins, beans, onions, potatoes, and plenty of salads.

Not only can I feed my family with tasty healthy organic food, but also use the colourful crops for my photography: I do a lot of commercial stillife photography, so growing my own makes sense on more than one level.

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I love strawberries

The strawberries have taken over my vegetable patch, but I do not have the heart to trim them back to their original habitat. Instead I have extended the vegetable patch in a stylish triangle, which I can access from all sides.

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How it all started

At the end of 2014 I was approached by Sarah Langton-Lockton, the garden columnist of The Lady magazine. She had recently moved to the area, and was looking for a photographer to document the development of her new garden.

A few months on and I have had my photos published in 3 editions of The Lady Magazine. It is a great pleasure to visit Sarah’s garden on a regular basis, to witness the work and document the seasonal changes, and to have my photos illustrate her interesting columns. Apart from enjoying working with her on this project, I have also learned a lot from watching her meticulous planning and laying out of her garden with the help of my friend Posy Gentles (garden designer extraordinaire).

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