Never heard of Merseyside Farms? Well, that’s because it’s my made up farm where I photograph really large produce. Merseyside is the name of my photography corporation.
I was inspired to do this series of large produce farms when I was looking at old postcards from the early 1900’s. In fact I did a post about – the post cards are called “Exaggerated Produce” and here’s the post.
I thought you might like to see how I put this together. I use a very wide angle zoom lens on a Canon 5D Mark ii. The zoom was set to about 14mm.
The large black stand my camera is on is called a mono-pod. This thing will lock down and it will not move – so much so that I have many bruises from this beast. I shoot and composite a lot of shots so the camera can absolutely not move.
You can see my set is like a triangle. You can see the coverage of the lens as I only build the set where it will be seen. My set is about 8 feet square.
Above is the view from the back of the set looking towards the camera. You can see the edge of my cookaloris on the top right. I use this a lot as it gives very realistic dappled light. Here is another post where I show using the cookaloris in the same way.
I used fresh herbs for the green you see on the dirt. These shots take me a few days to set up so you can see the wet spots on the dirt from the corn. I put them away overnight and then shoot it next morning.
Here is a side view of the set.
You can see by the side view that I have to tilt up the back part of the set in order for the framing to look good. I take my time, put in the props piece by piece and take pictures all along the way and move things around until they are exactly where I want them.
Here is a shot taken from the camera as I’m placing the corn into the field. I got the toy truck and the toy trailer in the field on ebay by looking for “vintage toy trucks”.
Lastly here is a frame by frame sequence I took over the two days of the making of Merseyside Corn Field.
At the end of this video you’ll see links to some other frame by frame movies of the other mini sets I’ve done.
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