"I'm sure you have received a flood of emails about yesterday, but let my add my kudos for giving us the joy of hearing  David Perry's presentation.  In my estimation, the best program I have ever enjoyed at the Garden Club!"
This, in response to: "In The Garden of HIs Imagination", presented at the Santa Barbara Art Museum for the Santa Barbara Garden Club.
Need a speaker? 
A workshop leader? 
Consider these current lecture & workshop topics David is offering: 
(or inquire about a customized workshop for your particular group)
In the Garden of Your Imagination: We come to gardens in search of gifts and depending on a myriad of factors, find what we seek in varying measure. For some, a garden visit is principally about seeing and spending time with the plants themselves while for others it is much more about the magical doorways those plants create between our imaginations and the worlds they are planted in, for a garden, truly is a world set apart, a painted canvas within which the visitor is free to either sit quietly in contemplation or chatter along with the monkeys in his head, or seek some very personalized and nuanced place in-between.
Photographer and storyteller, David Perry is a careful listener, an attuned seer and an insightful garden interpreter. He comes into gardens to see and hear what they have to say, to rub up against their magic and ultimately, to find ways to show and share their enlarging gifts. For him, gardens are more than just curated plant collections within a landscape, they are also mirrors, however imperfect, that reflect back to us in small, subtle ways, hints about where we are within our journeys, where we are bound up and where we are able to stretch and breathe free.
Spend an inspirational hour with David as he shows you glimpse after glimpse behind the garden veil, as he shares many of his very personal images and offers insights about how to sit with a garden, see deeply into it and occasionally, enter into profound conversation with it. Learn how he treats his garden visits as open-ended meditations… and shares many of his most beautiful captured glimpses of them as questions asked, visual poems awaiting a response from the viewer.
This subject works as a lecture which can be followed by any of the hands-on workshops listed below.​​​​​​​
The iPhone/Smartphone Gardener: The cameras within iPhones, smartphones and iPads these days are miniature wonders, nearly always within our reach and capable of making magical photographs that can be enhanced and immediately shared through email, tweets and text messages, or posted to one’s social networking pages. This wildly accessible new picture paradigm has created a renaissance in visual storytelling allowing each of us to capture and share our most magical moments. Having dipped our toes into these playful waters few of us would voluntarily go back to the world before smartphone cameras. Instead, we want to become more fluent with them, more capable of making them capture what we see in our mind’s eye. Spend an introductory hour with author/photographer, David E. Perry as he demonstrates the amazing potential these smart phone cameras offer and helps you master their wonders while sidestepping some of their inherent pitfalls.
Workshop: Following the iPhone Gardener lecture where you’ll become aware of the many of your smartphone camera’s possibilities and wonders you’ll have a chance to practice what you’ve just learned and expand on it in a hands-on workshop. Begin to master three amazing photo apps in a follow-up workshop with David Perry, wandering and shooting with new eyes. Targeted at all levels of smartphone photographer including those still intimidated by their smartphone cameras, this workshop assures a certain amount of laughter and learning through playfully illustrated examples and coaching. David will work with you individually and in small groups, helping you master your fresh, new foundation of information, helping you learn to compose better shots, tell better stories and begin mastering many of those previously hidden secrets within your iPhone/smartphone camera. 
This subject works both as a lecture and as a hands-on workshop.

Picture Perfect Plant Portraits: You’ll need access to a beautiful garden if you want to make beautiful garden pictures but you only need a single, interesting plant in order to make its portrait. Plant portraits are not the same as garden portraits, even though both have plants pictured in them. Garden portraits are all about relationships, plants in interplay with other nearby plants, as well as the light and space of the garden and the unique landscapes they have been planted in. 
‘Plant portraits’ on the other hand are generally more specific and more closely targeted. They are a great place for aspiring garden photographers to begin honing their craft, since making portraits of plants doesn’t require an entire garden, but can certainly happen within one.
By exploring the very notion of what makes a portrait a portrait and examining the different kinds of portraits familiar to us within the realm of people imagery, photographer/storyteller David Perry offers a playful new framework from which to consider how best to picture the plants we love, whether through close-ups, group photos, telling details, candids or environmental portraits, and will then guide students as they search out and capture examples of each style within the garden setting.
This subject works both as a lecture and as a hands-on workshop.


The Art of Art in the Garden: A playful, illustrated discussion about the use of art in the garden. What works. What almost works. What doesn't work at all. This is a great lecture choice for garden clubs and garden oriented groups that would like to explore this topic more completely, using this generously illustrated slide lecture to ask questions, disarm, spur imaginations and open up a lively discussion.

FROM MEH TO WOW: TAKE PHOTOS TO REALLY SELL YOUR WORK.
This lecture is specifically designed for landscape and garden professionals.

It doesn’t matter so much what kind of camera you have as what you do with the camera you have—you can learn to make stunning plant portraits and compose better garden and landscape photos with just a handful of easy-to-understand principals. And by mastering some relatively easy and invaluable apps, learn how you can enhance those photos with your smartphones to make them more beautiful and show off your work more professionally. David will teach you to see better pictures in your mind’s eye, when and how you should team up with a professional, rather than DIY, how to improve the photos you've already captured, and how to avoid many common pitfalls. Sharing the story of your work with prospective clients and/or editors to really capture their imaginations and attention is big, important work. It is key to getting more of the work you love and more challenging projects. It is also completely doable. Let David help you and your group empower your presentations and tell better stories.
Telling Better Stories: Some photographs can pull us instantly through time and space into moments we would never be able experience otherwise. They invest us in those moments, infer their meanings and help us relate. When they manage that, when they somehow transport us past the mere notion of ‘what’ and into those deliciously nuanced realms of when, why, and how, photos become far more than image alone. They become ‘story.’ 
We love stories. We love the ways they inform us, entertain us, inspire us . . .   We love how they enlarge our worlds and allow us to share experiences with others. Add to such stories the additional, visual feast of color and shape, and you begin to understand why we sometimes find ourselves moved more by pictures that tell stories than we are by words alone. 
If you want to learn how to make pictures that tell better stories, this is the lecture/workshop for you.
In ancient times, those with the storyteller’s gift were the shamans of their tribes. They were the magicians who could somehow pull all those disparate threads within a community’s existence together and weave them into meanings that both guided and enhanced their communities. Their unique gift guaranteed them a respected place within the family as the storytellers. Think of it. They were the spiritual rudders of their community’s ship. 
Storytelling is a high calling and making pictures that move beyond the "Ooohh, pretty!' stage is something that many of us aspire to. Give yourself the gift of becoming a better storyteller. Join master photographer/storyteller, David Perry as we explore the ways that imbuing pictures with story makes them more powerful, more fascinating and ever so much more memorable.
This subject works both as a lecture and as a hands-on workshop.


This is another lecture designed for garden and landscape professionals. If this sounds like an interesting topic for your group, please inquire.
David Perry is an inspirational, Seattle-based photographer, a willing teacher and a captivating storyteller with a keen knack for observation and a distinct twinkle in his eye. His reverence for gardens, flowers and the gardeners who tend them is apparent in the pictures he makes and his playful, sometimes irreverent manner of speaking about them keeps audiences on the edge of their seats. Onstage he is a spirited, dynamic speaker who makes his presentation topics memorable and relevant to audiences through the ample use of clever graphics, breathtaking imagery, playful humor, and by never, ever talking down to them.
The inquisitive son of a zoologist, David grew up in the field with his dad, trapping and preserving specimens for museums, exploring bat caves throughout the South and Southwest and studying the complex interplay between life forms and their ecologies. He began documenting his impressions of the living world around him with cameras at a very early age and has never stopped exploring the world through lens and viewfinder.
He has been photographing assignments for books, magazines, scores of Fortune 500 annual reports, national ad campaigns for more than three decades. 
David’s work has been featured on the cover of Fine Gardening four times in the past few years, and many times in Sunset, This Old House Magazine, Better Homes & Gardens, American Rose, Flower Magazine, Leaf Magazine, Garden Design, Pacific Horticulture, Northwest Horticulture and Cut Flower Quarterly. David is the photographer and co-creator of The 50 Mile Bouquet (St. Lynn’s Press, 2012), with award-winning author, Debra Prinzing and was a principal photographer for John J. Albers’ book, Gardening for Sustainability (Vista Gardens Press, 2014). He is currently at work on another book, Your Garden Can Make a Difference, with John which should be released this next spring. David also teaches photography workshops around the country and in his West Seattle garden, and offers classes in photography and storytelling currently through Bellevue College and through The Center for Urban Horticulture at University of Washington Botanic Gardens.

Learn more about David: http://about.me/david.perry
or contact him directly, using the form below:
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