Garden Photography with Saxon Holt

This Week's Podcast: A Replay: Good Garden Photography — Saxon Holt's e-book Workshop

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For years, most gardens featured in newspapers, magazines and even books were shot by any photographer assigned to the job. For a while, interior and architectural photographers added gardens to their lists of specialties. But, I always felt that people who gardened themselves and knew plants did better at capturing the feeling of a garden.
Award-winning photographer Saxon Holt knows the plants in his challenging climate. His work has appeared in scores of publications – magazines and books. He’s located in California, which makes him in a place with rich garden locations, but also years of drought. Gardening in California’s summer-dry climate has taught him to respect the native landscape, the importance of adapted plants — and the value of photography to promote successful gardening. His summer-dry.com website provides a photo database of plants in garden settings to inspire people in similar climates.
Now, Saxon has developed a garden picture resource for stock photos, tips on garden photography, and a self-publishing platform at PhotoBotanic.com. His first e-book, “Good Garden Photography,” from the four-part series "The PhotoBotanic Garden Photography Workshop,” was recently recognized with an electronic media award from the Garden Writers Association. (Left, a demonstration of “the rule of thirds,” a lesson from the e-book.)
He writes, “Hunting for photos is one of the great joys of garden photography, involving the distillation of a grand garden experience down to images that tell a story of how the garden makes you, the photographer, feel.
When your photos tell stories, when they reveal not just the garden but what you have to say about it, they are ‘good’ photos.”