How to create a gardening blog…fast and free!

- Joel Heffner

The best way to show off your garden and learn about other gardens is to see pictures…on blogs.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many gardening blogs by flower clubs! And the ones that do exist are usually not maintained. It’s not unusual to look at a club’s site that talks about their recent show…in 2015.

Considering that you can create a website in a manner of minutes (yes, minutes) and you can create one for free…I’m not sure why there aren’t more of them. If your club wants to get started here’s a quick list of things to do.

  1. Go to Blogger to create an account. All it takes is a free email address using Gmail.
  2. Once you have an account you can create a blog and have it online…in minutes.
  3. Yes, it’s that fast…and free.
  4. Your site will have an address that will look like this: namethatyoupick.blogspot.com.
    If you want to get fancy you can register your own domain name (i.e. namethatyoupick.com) for $12 per year. No kidding, it’s that cheap.
  5. Enjoy. Need help, don’t hesitate to contact me. No kidding.

The first gardening blog…?

- Joel Heffner

Gardening is very popular. Blogging is very popular. It’s no wonder that there are so many excellent gardening blogs. However, the first and probably the best gardening blog had no photos. It was begun on March 30, 1766 … by Thomas Jefferson!

Jefferson was an avid gardener who kept meticulous records of his garden. He probably thought of it a diary. We call them blogs. Here’s an example of the first entry that Jefferson made.

As Jefferson wrote it…
As reproduced…

The collection makes up The Garden and Farm Books of Thomas Jefferson. It consists of more than 500 pages of information about his garden.

Photo displays at flower shows…

- Joel Heffner

A relatively recent addition to flower shows is the inclusion of photography competitions. The First District (Staten Island) incorporated a photo competition last June’s show. Three dozen photos were entered by garden club members and outsiders. The photos were displayed at the flower show and were enjoyed by all. The judges were very impressed with what they saw. I’m proud to say that I coordinated the exhibit. Check to see if a flower show in your area will be sponsoring a photo competition.

A snapshot of me with the photo display…

When speaking…use your own!

- Joel Heffner
P.J.

Too many speakers are lazy and look for stock photos to use in their PowerPoint presentations. Although stock photos are available on all topics, they aren’t personal.

For example, if I were speaking about Pugs (a topic near and dear to my heart) I could find a zillion photos of Pugs to illustrate my talk. However, using the photo of P.J. would make it special. I could explain that I took it more than 25 years ago, when P.J. attended his first dog show. [He didn’t do very well that day, but did eventually become an A.K.C. champion!]

If possible, use your own photos! It will help your presentation be unique and personal.

You can’t do this with an iPhone…

- Joel Heffner
Just a bird in the backyard.

Although I use my iPhone to take photos 99% of the time, there are times when it just doesn’t work. This is one of them. I saw the bird outside in the yard. I was inside, in the kitchen. If I tried to take the photo with my iPhone I’d hardly even know it was a bird.

So, I took my dinky little point-and-shoot camera out of the drawer…and took the photo. Sometimes, you have to admit that your iPhone isn’t ideal. 🙁

The past and present…

- Joel Heffner
Zone VI Newsletter — April 1980

Before we used digital cameras, we had to figure out exposure using light meters that weren’t very accurate, cameras that varied in their results, and chemicals that we had to keep at specific temperatures. Few photographers paid enough attention to the details. Fred Picker did.

Over the years he wrote a quarterly newsletter that described what he thought was the ideal way to take photos…as well as advertise equipment from his Zone VI company. The one issue of the newsletter that I remember was in April 1980, Issue #24. In it he described what he called a “Key Day.” A Key Day was the ideal sunny day without clouds. According to Fred, if you knew the setting for a key day, you could figure out the proper exposure for other outdoor scenes.

For those who shoot with digital cameras, from iPhones to DSLRs, you might want to quiz yourself on how well you can predict proper exposure settings. Take a picture. Guess what you think is the correct f/stop, shutter speed, and ISO. Then cheat…and look at the digital photo’s info, like this one. How well did you do?

Flower taken with an iPhone — ISO 100 | f/1.8 | 1/69 sec

I didn’t want to use this flower…

- Joel Heffner
Sorry, I was lazy. 🙁

The weather was great. I was in the yard. I wanted to take a photo of a flower.

Not this one.

The flower I wanted was not in a position I could get to. My iPhone didn’t do much good because of its lack of a zoom. So, I turned to a flower that was closer and took this disappointing picture.

Sorry.

Tomorrow, I’ll go back with a zoom and hope the flowers look as good.

Although I love my iPhone. It just wasn’t enough.