What most people do when they see something that they find pleasing - be that a flower, a plant, or a garden view, Is to stand exactly where they are, lift the camera up, hold it at arms' length, look at the screen on the back of the camera, use the zoom control, and press the shutter. If they have a companion with them they may well ask the companion to 'be in the picture'.

Do you recognise this? I certainly do (apart from the screen on the back bit - cameras had viewfinders when I first started using them).

And then when you get back home and see the pictures full size on the monitor, or get some prints back from the Machine in the Mall, then there is often a sense of disappointment. Things don't look as big or as bright as you remember, colourful vistas of narcissus or tulips mixed with the blues of scilla and anemone seem drab, your companion seems small, ranks of rhododendrons filling your world seem to have disappeared and the picture is all sky and grass with the fantastic border just a tiny coloured strip in the middle…

We've all experienced this sense of not getting back what we saw and what we wanted to bring home as a memory of our day.

The problem is an easy one to solve - once you know the reason it happens.

It's your eyes' fault. Well really it's your brain's fault but we don't want to get too technical here. Vision is an interpretive event. We don't really see what we point our eyes at. Our eyes take it all in, but our consciousness focuses on only a little bit of what our eyes are reporting is 'out there'. There's just too much information to do otherwise.

It's probably not too big a stretch of my intuition to guess that you are focused on these words right now and you probably have a lesser awareness of other colours and images on your monitor. But if you just notice now all of the things that are in your field of vision without actually moving your eyes away from these words, you'll perhaps become aware of the keyboard, your hands, maybe the computer itself, perhaps stuff on your desk, doors, windows, walls furniture, people, a whole load of stuff that was 'invisible' to you until your attention was drawn to it.

Your camera, just like your eyes, takes everything in - whether you've noticed it or not. And that's the problem. We don't notice an awful lot. And so we don't notice a lot of what's in the field of view when we point our cameras. Our companion looks large because they are all we see. The camera sees everything around them as well. The rhododendrons look fantastic because we ignore the sky and the grass because it's nowhere near as interesting as all the bright colours in that thin strip in the middle of our field of view.

When you are taking pictures you have to teach yourself how to see again. You have to observe everything. You have to look all around the edges of the frame of the screen or the viewfinder and notice everything that's included and its relationship to everything else. This might not really sound like fun, but it's well worth the effort and if you take a lot of pictures it soon becomes second nature. And if you carry on taking lots of pictures soon you'll be able to do it even before you lift the camera up to your eye.

The trick to taking flower & garden photographs with good composition is simply to learn how to identify the key elements of the view and then choose your position so that you emphasise those key elements. Changing your physical position relative to the subject will change the relationship of all of the key elements to each other. Composition is the art of making that 'arrangement' pleasing to the eye in the final image.

It's much easier than it sounds.

Your brain is already wired to appreciate beauty.

Let me give you a very simple example to show you what I mean.

I was out walking along a lake the other day. The lake edge was a profusion of wildflowers. But photographing wildflowers is not quite as easy as photographing flowers and gardens. The reason it is not as easy is because no one clears away the dead foliage from last year. No one arranges the borders with reference to the colour wheel, or neatly sorts the plants according to height and form. There is also no discrimination - no one weeds out anything that isn't earning its keep.

Wildflowers really are just a bit of a jumble.

So I stood and looked around and noticed that what caught my eye were the bright spikes of Purple Loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria). That was going to be the subject of my picture of the lake edge.

I have deliberately chosen a simple subject as an example. Simple, at first sight unexciting, subjects are plentiful. So challenge yourself a little, go out and find somewhere like this and get some practice in. The equipment used for these shots was a hand-held digital SLR, but there is nothing here that you cannot do with a reasonable quality digital compact with a 5x optical zoom like the Nikon Coolpix P60, Nikon Coolpix S550, or the Canon Digital IXUS 970 IS.