Client Project: Landscape and Nature Photography

"I want you to capture the soul of the garden."

                                Christine London, client

This Spring begins a year long project to document the intimacy and secret world of plantings, flowers and various moods.  Last summer I had the honor of acquainting myself with a private estate in Beverly Hills.  The most fascinating part of the natural world is how it changes moment to moment, day to day, season to season.  It's one of my favorite assignments to date.  As a naturalist and artist I receive immense pleasure from wandering outside with my camera, listening to the birds and finding magic around every corner.

“One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands out and throws one's head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out...

...and one's heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun--which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.

 

One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries.

 

Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with the millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in someone's eyes.” 

Excerpts by Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden