Recently, I purchased a Pentax *istD digital camera to take photographs to accompany my gardening articles. It’s a pricey little camera, but it’s certainly been worth the cost, so far.

For the past couple of years, I have used a small, extremely inexpensive Creative digital camera that produced pictures that were good enough for web pages, or for personal interest, such as including in The Garden Management System gardening software database. Samples of these images can be found on my favourite plants pages. While these images serve very nicely for this purpose, the quality of the images is not good enough for publication, by a long shot. My gardening articles regularly appear in Centre of the City magazine. I wanted to provide images that illustrated the articles.

My goals, with garden photography, are to capture clearly the beauty and detail of the smallest part of the flower, or to give a sense of volume through depth of field. High resolution photographs that meet my needs are now possible.

The camera will take a variety of different picture formats, and has more settings that I thought I could use. However, I’ve found that I don’t need to learn everything at once. I have set the camera to capture images in RAW format, which is the best possible image. I can then save it down to other formats, depending on the need.

As I learn more about digital photography, and my Pendax *istD digital camera, I will add to this section of the web site.

Helen's cat Fireball - You don't always know what they're eating. - size: 1,377kb	Helen's cat Fireball - size: 1,111kb	Hydrangea - size: 1,264kb
Calla Lily - size: 1,271	Impatiens - size: 1,221kb	Daylily - size: 3,544kb
Coneflower - size: 3,910kb	Hosta - size: 3,584kb	Phlox - size: 2,175kb

Helen Kirkup is a Master Gardener, writer and developer of The Garden Management System, gardening software to help you grow your garden.

Comments? hmkstaff@hmk.on.ca