Wegmans Fall Floral Offerings.
August 21st, 2009
Back in the latter part of August, the call came from Wegmans for us to fulfill their need for some new photography that would help to illustrate their Floral Department’s seasonal offerings. The concept was to create a series of cohesive images, both of the arrangements and bouquets developed by the Wegmans florists, and also to build some still-life imagery using the design components that would be incorporated into the arrangements themselves.
The end result would be a large, in-store display that would utilize a collage of images, illustrating the complete arrangements that the consumer could purchase, as well as the design elements that could be used to create arrangements driven by a customer’s own vision. The project would include a day of location photography at Wegmans Organic Test Farm, and a day of studio still-lifes. The Organic Farm was chosen for its rustic environment, which should lend itself well to complement the floral arrangements with an “Autumn” or “Harvest” flavor.
Spending time of the Wegmans Organic Test Farm is one of my favorite things, so I was really excited for another opportunity to shoot there. The weather, unfortunately, wasn’t cooperating as nicely as we had hoped. The forecast was for a heavy, gray day with drizzle and rain. Not optimal conditions for photographing flowers outdoors. Fortunately, our bag of tricks at Myers Creative Imaging included a 12 foot square canopy tent for just such an occasion. The tent was deployed at 7:00 am, and our day began, creativity being boosted by an earlier stop at the Canandaigua Starbucks. We provided our own version of “sunlight” with our Profoto strobe kit, softboxes and scrims.
I was in the company of Michael Buckley, a Wegmans art director, and Jenn Morse, my assistant for the project. We moved our tent around three or four times to the different spots we had chosen, and decided to keep the laptop set up in the greenhouse. Jenn would run the CF cards in from the tent and load them in the laptop for us to inspect. Despite the gloom of the day, I felt that we created some vibrant, energetic images! Our good luck held all day, and it didn’t rain too hard until the truck was halfway packed at the end of the day! One of the day’s high points was Jenn’s lunchtime run to Casa Italiana, located on Parrish Street in Canandaigua, to pick up some truly excellent subs. Italian Assorted, forget about it!
Camera: Canon EOS 1DS Mark 3.
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