Garden Design Commercial Shoot

I recently completed a commercial shoot for Crowborough based garden designer Mary Stevenson www.msgd.co.uk.

I had been looking forward to working with Mary for the last few years since we first met at a networking event and she was extremely complimentary about my portfolio. This year Mary celebrated her anniversary of 10 years in business and required professional images to display at her anniversary event, but also for ongoing marketing and promotion.

Mary has extensively photographed the gardens she has designed from the initial consultation to the finished garden and a year later when the garden has grown in more and has used a compact digital camera for this.  However, Mary was fully aware that she required a fresh set of eyes to photograph the gardens with a view to creating an emotional impact as opposed to simply documenting a garden.

We spent half a day on a recce of eight of her gardens in the East Sussex area to find which would be most suitable. I chose a gardens in Crowborough, Maresfield and in Sevenoaks with all the gardens demonstrating a good cross section of Mary’s design skills.

Mary was very pleased with the shots which initially she displayed on a looping slide show at her 10 years celebration and is now using them for submission to magazines and other marketing ventures. It was great fun doing the shoots, arriving at the gardens early in the morning or in the late afternoon or sundown to capture them in different light. We also dressed the gardens with various props to give the photos a human element.

My favourite shot was of the property with a large pond beside the patio. When I first saw it, I knew I wanted to photograph it at night. I used a mixture of butane lamps and my remote flashes to light the scene which I then photographed from across the pond. I even pulled a row-boat into the reeds and placed a butane lamp inside to illuminate it giving the scene. Waiting for the right time of the evening, just as the bats started to come out, I was able to capture a great balance of blues and pinks from the fading sun mixed with the yellows of the lamps and flashes creating interesting reflections and helping give the foliage more definition.