Hidden Amongst the Ferns
One of the lesser known beauties of Berkeley is the Regional Parks Botanic Garden. While most people would go to the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens at the base of the Berkeley hills, this more relaxed and completely free experience is perhaps even more worth having. While most botanical gardens focus on rare, exotic, or exciting plants from around the world, the Regional Parks Botanic Garden focuses on entirely plants native to California. Each are of the gardens is representative of a different region of the state, with many endangered plants carefully transplanted from their original homes.
It was on a day wandering these gardens that I so enjoy that I was struck by an image. While I had my camera in my bag for the entirety of the visit, the bench tucked in amongst the greenery was the only composition that caused me to pause my relaxing walk to take a photo. I took a variety of images, all down the same path, but experimenting with different distances and quantities of plant life in the foreground.
Once I sat down at a computer to edit the images I couldn’t pick just one to edit, so after editing the first image to embody the feeling that I had standing in the soothing sea of green I decided to also make a more artistic edit that shifted the colors to an extreme and has a nearly infrared photography vibe.
