Photographing Garden Visitors

Garden photography presents a number of possible angles, subjects, and vistas. Amidst all the various plants and flowers in different lights and stages of growth and blossoming, don’t forget a few shots of the visitors to your garden.

These visitors might be your cat, dog, definitely the local bird population, and maybe a squirrel or rabbit, perhaps from the neighboring field or forest. The most frequent visitors tend to be the most challenging: butterflies and insects. Size means you possibly overlook then until they are frightened away. Spend too much time setting up a shot and they finish with one flower or plant and move on. Not surprisingly, most butterflies prefer mid-day for their visit, a time when lighting often produces too much reflection and the bright colors blur the detail on your photograph. Mid-day also tends to be the time butterflies in particular are most active.

In my recent shots of garden visitors at Brooker Creek Preserve it was mid-morning in mid-summer in Florida, so lots of sun. In this case I used a polarizing filter. I can't be sure it helped, it isn't what it is designed to do, but I tried it anyway. I took a series of shots, and it definitely helped keep the detail I wanted.  An elevated boardwalk surrounds the garden providing the ability to change angles without tramping other vegetation. Although the garden is small in diameter, the boardwalk also limits the ability to get closer to those flowers in the middle, which is where the butterfly you want to photography will choose to land and pose.

I took several standard shots, mostly portraits of the butterflies but keeping the flowers part of the picture also. The butterflies remained separated enough due to the spacing of the flowers that a nice group shot of butterflies and flowers didn’t happen. The few other insects generally took off before I could get them, but I did get one nice bee shot.

After taking all the standard shots, I stood and watched for a short while, conscious that I only had a limited time before my next engagement. Walking around the garden on the boardwalk I noticed the interesting shapes and colors from the back of the flower with the butterfly feeding in front but part of the wings spread beyond the flower itself. I managed one that I liked. I liked the nature/artist aspect of those photographs, and plan to take more to see what combinations I can get.