Join our photo lessons at Brookside Gardens, a 50-acre public garden in Wheaton, Maryland, offering a wide variety of opportunities for nature, landscape, and garden photography just outside Washington, DC.
Brookside Gardens offers photographers a changing mix of landscaped gardens, wooded paths, ponds, bridges, flowers, trees, and architectural features. Your Digital Photo Academy instructor will help you look beyond individual plants and use pathways, garden structures, water, and layers of foliage to create stronger compositions. Experiment with leading lines, framing, depth of field, and different points of view as you move through the gardens.
The garden includes several distinct areas, including the Aquatic Garden, Azalea Garden, Japanese-style Gude Garden, Woodland Walk, Maple Terrace, Perennial Garden, and other formal and naturalistic spaces. Ponds and streams provide opportunities to photograph reflections, while bridges, pathways, and the Japanese Tea House can be incorporated into wider landscape compositions. Your instructor can demonstrate how changing camera position or focal length can simplify a busy garden scene and bring attention to a specific subject.
Brookside Gardens is particularly well suited to fall photography. During October and November, deciduous trees and shrubs such as Japanese maples and dogwoods can provide changing red, orange, and yellow foliage, while ornamental grasses, berries, and other seasonal details offer additional close-up subjects. Depending on the timing and weather, a November workshop may still provide colorful foliage to photograph along with fallen leaves, reflections, and late-season textures.
Use a wider aperture to isolate individual leaves, flowers, berries, or garden details against softer backgrounds, or stop down to keep more of the landscape in focus. Water, bridges, trees, and garden structures also provide opportunities to practice foreground placement, symmetry, reflections, and creating a sense of depth within the frame.
With both carefully designed gardens and more natural wooded areas, Brookside Gardens gives students the chance to practice a range of photography techniques within one location while observing how light, color, and composition change from one part of the garden to another.
Meeting Spot:
Meet your Digital Photo Academy instructor in front of the main entrance to the Brookside Gardens Visitor Center.
Brookside Gardens Visitor Center
1800 Glenallan Avenue
Wheaton, MD 20902
Admission to Brookside Gardens is free.
Know Before You Go:
Bring your camera or cellphone and any gear you can comfortably carry. Make sure batteries are fully charged and memory cards have space. Dress for the weather, and wear comfortable shoes for walking.
Each Composition in the Field class begins with a talk with one of our experienced instructors, and then you and your fellow students take a stroll through one of a variety of photogenic locales (in any of the 20+ cities the DPA encapsulates). There is street photography, magnificent interiors, farmers markets, zoos, landscapes, and more, photos of which are included within. These photos are a mix of student and instructor images in many different venues and cities across the United States and Canada.
You will have fun, learn to shoot strategically, get more interesting photos of the event, and walk away with a foundation to improve your photographs in the future, whether you’re traveling, or at a birthday party and everywhere in between.
Please note: If a class must be cancelled due to weather or other circumstances beyond our control we will be happy to work with you to reschedule. If you should need to cancel and require a new class date, contact us. A $25 transfer fee will be imposed without a 3 day notice before the scheduled class.
