Foxglove Green

Chris and Marilyn Schmah of Foxglove Farm and Garden Supply hiding out in the greenery (above) and in their gorgeous greenhouse (below).

Foxglove is a longtime Salt Spring business and certainly worth exploring if you visit the Island. I hope to be going back soon to capture the uniqueness and the old Salt Spring charm of the interiors.

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Photographer’s note: the story behind the photos

You rarely get a glimpse of ‘behind-the-scene’ in a photo. Which probably makes sense. A photo is what it is.

But here’s a glimpse of what’s behind these two photos:

This was a last minute magazine assignment, a cover and an interior shot for a Q&A section. Last minute as in a Sunday shoot with a Monday a.m. deadline. I had pretty much figured that the cover photo needed to be in the greenhouse, had to feature Chris and Marilyn, and still had to identify the branding and give a sense of (and perhaps exaggerate the) scale.

The Greenhouse Shot
We were lucky with the weather as the forecast storm came in hard and left early. It was heavy overcast during setup then broke into partly clear during the shoot. It gave us an interesting directional light and some condensation the glass. The light was too harsh though so I set up two strobes to provide fill front and left. The strobes were powered by a portable supply. Some distractions were removed from the background and some plants moved to the foreground. A super-wide tilt-shift lens gave just over 100 degrees coverage which, shifted, provided the scale. The Schmahs, although distortion free, were only six feet from the camera. The greenhouse shot is shown full frame.

The Head Shot
My idea was augmented by Chris’ use of ferns. Ferns were arranged on the greenhouse floor with space left for two heads. We setup near a scaffold which was being used to replace a roof vent. This allowed me to shoot pretty much straight down with a portrait lens. A screen was added at the last minute to block the sun which by this time was blaring into the greenhouse. No additional lighting was required. The Schmahs chose their own clothing and it couldn’t have been more perfect. By the way, this image is presented here upside down. Not sure why, but it looks much better this way. YMMV

The whole shoot, including setup and takedown took about 90 minutes. (Planning and communication took about three hours.) We had several more ideas to try, but decided what we had worked well. The image editing took another hour or so. The images were uploaded Sunday evening.