Creative Project

I wanted to do a scene that was light and bright. I love the daylight look so I wanted to keep everything white with just a hint of color. I really like farm scenes because I have always wanted to live on a farm. It’s not too late is it?

I looked on google for some farm still lifes and found a few good ideas. I knew I wanted to keep it simple. I went to Hobby Lobby and looked at every single item in the store to try to find something that looked like the idea I had in my head which was to have a wire basket with some eggs in it and maybe a couple eggs on the side and then a bottle of milk. For some reason milk and eggs go together because when you live on a farm you go out and milk the cow and then you collect the eggs from the chickens. 

Morning on the Farm

So, I went to Hobby Lobby and I found a milk bottle and an enameled milk jug and some enameled cups and a wire basket for the eggs. Then I went to Walmart and I found a utensil holder and I got all of the wooden utensils from my baking drawer so there's about 20 of them and put them into the ceramic utensil holder. At Walmart I also found some hydrangeas because I wanted a little tiny bit of blue color in the scene instead of just all white because milk and eggs are all white. I didn't want to have brown eggs because I wanted everything to be light and bright and white. So, I wanted to find a kitchen towel with a little bit of blue in it but I couldn't find it so I got a little square of material that was the same blue as the hydrangeas. 

I didn't want to use real milk because it's wasteful so I looked up how to make fake milk and Google said just put a little tiny bit of white paint in some water so that's what I did for the milk. When I was at Hobby Lobby and the Home Store I saw some fake eggs but they were like $5 a dozen and I knew I could get real eggs for $2 a dozen so I went to Walmart and got the eggs. When I got home I hard boiled the eggs to make sure that they didn't make a mess just in case I dropped one. Also at Walmart I got a sheer curtain because I had the vision to somehow put everything in front of a window, just wasn’t sure how I was going to do it.

For the farm scene I got everything setup in about a half hour. It seems to go faster every time because I am getting more efficient. I brought more props than I thought I would use just in case I wanted to try different things but I wanted to keep it simple. I don’t like images with a lot of clutter. I hate clutter.

I metered my camera for f/5.6 at 1/125 sec. and an ISO of 100. I used a Nikon D850 with a 28-300mm lens set at 90mm. I metered my subject and adjusted the strobes to f/5.6.

I had one strobe on the right and one on the background. I was not happy with the darker background behind the curtain because the curtain was not big enough to cover the entire background when I moved it backward to blur it out a little. I put a light on the background and in order to make it look more like morning, I put a light yellow gel on the strobe that was aimed at the background.

After this I wanted to see what it would look like with the window. At first I had the wall straight across the back of the table but I could see the reflection of the octobox in the window so I put it at an angle. Then I could only see one of the mullions and it looked like a stick in the background. So, I angled the wall to get more of the window next to the curtain. I don’t think anyone will question how the curtain and window fit together. It’s art.

The white enameled milk jug was getting readings of 247 and the whole scene looked well lit.

In camera RAW, I removed chromatic aberration and corrected for the lens profile. Other than that I didn’t feel it needed any other adjustments. In Photoshop, I added some vibrance and texture.

Here's some of the outtakes:

This was on of the first shots I took. I wanted to lighten the wall in the background so it wasn't distracting.

This is after I put a strobe on the background with a yellow gel. I moved everything backward so that the object were slightly out of focus to give it a feeling of depth. I also put the egg that was on the table in the basket. Not really noticeable but I think it makes a difference in balance.