Flowers at Giverny © Harold Davis

I visited Monet’s wonderful garden at Giverny with my small group of photographers. In the late afternoon, we had the garden mostly to ourselves and were able to photograph in the golden light.

Giverny Afternoon © Harold Davis

I’ve been lucky enough to visit Monet’s gardens at Giverny three times in the past year, and each time they’ve been very different. The spring this year was good for tulips, and in the water garden area the wisteria were glorious.

Giverny © Harold Davis

There is a problem working in Monet’s gardens. These gardens are themselves are a work of art. Of course, they have been the most important subject of a great and world famous artist (Claude Monet himself). It’s hard not to look at Monet’s gardens, or to imagery depicting the gardens, without thinking of Monet’s great waterlily paintings.

Giverny Watercolor © Harold Davis

In the shadow of the legendary, my best advice is to have fun—and not worry about the context or comparison too much. That’s what I did this year in Giverny. I had a blast, and look forward to processing more of my images from this very special place.

Related stories: Giverny via iPhone, White Chrysanthemums at Giverny, Dreaming of Giverny, Meditation at Giverny.

At a casual glance, this is a fairly simple selective focus image of lush white flowers in an autumn garden. Actually, there’s more to it photographically than meets the eye. (Knowing me, this probably won’t surprise you!) Let me explain.

White Chrysanthemums Japonicum at Giverny © Harold Davis

First, and somewhat unusually, this is a close-up of a flower using an extreme wide-angle lens (my Zeiss 15mm f/2.8 on a full-frame DSLR). This means that the front element of my lens was only two inches from the flower that is in focus (and central to the image).

Next, I created the slight blurring in the out-of-focus blossoms by intentionally creating motion in the flowers. I had my camera on a tripod, manually located the point I wanted to focus on, and outside of the frame I pushed the flowering plant with my free hand. When the flower entered my in-focus zone I snapped the exposure using a remote release at a shutter speed fast enough to stop some of the motion but still render the attractive blur. The settings were 1/125 of a second at f/5.6 and ISO 200.

It takes a bit of doing to pull off this partial motion blur and selective focus technique. You can find some more information in my online Photographing Flowers course.

By the way, the chrysanthemum—particularly white chrysanthemums—are important symbolic flowers in Japan. I feel there is some significance in photographing this very Japanese flower in Giverny, the garden of Claude Monet (whose work was so influenced by Japanese art), shortly before my own trip to Japan.

Check out photos of Japan on my blog.

Check out photos of France on my blog.