Scott McFarland's vision has evolved out of a familiarity with the particular environments he photographs. To date he has created several bodies of work exploring such traditional regional subjects as gardens and their maintenance, a friend's cabin and boathouse, as well as the space of photography itself, the darkroom. Regardless of the subject matter, a personal consideration is present in which the artist attempts to reconcile a 'true' notion of the real with the limited one which is captured by the camera lens. McFarland's photographs, which employ subtle digital alteration, return the image as much as possible to its orginal appearance seen by the eye. This alteration includes both exposure and accurate colour correction.

The space of the garden has long been affiliated with that of photography - many early photographers experimented with the cumbersome, expensive medium by photographing their immediate outdoor surroundings; McFarland has suggested associations between the idiosyncrasies in garden maintenance and those of photographic development processes. Both gardening and photography utilize the same basic elements; light for exposure and energy and liquids for hydration and processing. The photographs of the cabin and boathouse spaces developed from frequent visits by the artist to the same coastal property over several years. In them can be seen the intimacy of everyday activities, such as the ritual boiling of water to make tea, as well as the ambience and materiality of the architectural vernacular which so interested early modern photographers.

McFarland's work thus represents iconic ideas about the local, linking them to the history of photography while using technology as a new way of representation, as a means of accessing the purity of our original experience. Often exhibited as large colour photographs, they have also appeared in magazine works as well as book projects.