Since the advent of the digital camera, garden photos have never been so prolific. Images of plants, flowers and garden landscapes abound. You can taken them with your DSLR, high mega-pixel digital camera or, even more mobile, your very versatile camera phone.

But garden photos are just another image unless you take the time, and effort, to craft them into something wonderful. Here are a few resources and tips to help make yours the standout success that you desire.

Freep.com have a great article titled “How to blossom into a pro when shooting photos in your garden” [link since removed]. Rob Cardillo, introduced to us by GardenRant, offers us a few tips to enhance our garden photos.

• Take care with lighting: “It will enable you to make an extraordinary picture out of an ordinary subject”
• Think three, five and other odd numbers: Three or five flowers are easier on the eye, which likes triangles inside square frames.
• Use a tripod: It will keep things steady and create background and depth.
• “Wander without purpose” around your subjects: If you shoot in a public garden or at a flower show, lose the crowd and look for an unexpected view.
• Consider your garden a sculpture: In other words, something to be admired from every angle.
• Be patient and flexible: you still have to shoot 10,000 pictures before you understand what makes a great photograph.

If you’re interested in taking landscape photos then this post I wrote earlier may hold some keys for you as well.

Dean Fosdick, from WTOP.com, gives us some practical uses for the garden photos we take.

• Record-keeping. A picture really is worth a thousand words, especially if you’re keeping a journal or diary tracking the gardening changes you’ve made season by season.
• Landscape ideas. Visit public gardens or tour well-tended neighborhoods to record designs, colors, patterns or plant combinations you like.
• Identification. Document changes in plant maturity as you would a child’s growth spurts
• Memory prompt. Collect images of your garden through the seasons to identify empty spaces and perennial sites.
• Photograph the plants that worked well and those that didn’t. Build on your successes and avoid repeating the failures.
• Succession planting. It can help you design your garden a different way each year.
• Inventories. A photographic record of your tools, implements, garden furniture, yard art and outbuildings
• Wildlife pictures. Photographers often pursue images of plants and critters at the same time.
• Fine art. Look at published garden pictures. Study (the) paintings of classic artists. Then try to make something similar.

Once you have these awesome garden photos, what do you do with them? Apart from the obvious print them out and then scrapbook them for posterity there are some online tools that may help you organize them an even give you a place to show them off. Some sites worth looking at are;

• Flickr – almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world
• SmugMug – A company that backs up your photos to three data centers across the U.S.
• DropShots – Next Generation Photo and Video Sharing

For those with cameras built into their mobile phones there are new technologies that are clamouring to make it possible to upload your photos. One such app is the Eye-Fi created for Apple’s iPhone [link since removed].