I love plants, and especially flowers, and every year in Late November, early December the local garden centre gets a few tiny miniature violets and cyclamen. I like to buy several, and keep them in mini tea cups on my plant stand in the kitchen...
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I like to use the tiny plants in doll photos throughout the winter. I wanted to take photos of them with Monica this time, as she loves flowers, but didn't think either of her regal red gowns were suitable to be wearing while working with plants, so I made her something more casual
Unfortunately I wasn't feeling very well most of November and December, and the tiny violets were almost finished blooming. Then for Christmas our daughter-in law gifted me with a small ceramic pot that she'd made, complete with a miniature orchid.
So I finally decided to take the photos I'd wanted to of Monica and her plants, before all my tiny plants were no longer in bloom. Since she was a Queen, and deserved a more elaborate setting than I'd put together in the past, I decided to set up a 'conservatory' on my kitchen table.
I used the wooden 'cathedral railings', and the styrofoam pillars and arch for architectural elements, and gathered all kinds of furniture and props that one would find, or use, in a greenhouse, complete with empty pots, a wheelbarrow, and a tub of potting soil. Then I filled in the scene with all my mini plants and ivies....
Then I had to rearrange the plants in the background, so none of the big pots from the hanging plants actually showed. I also needed to hang lots of ivies in the north window to hide the neighbour's flag, so it wouldn't show up in the background...
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I had originally thought to have Lawrence get Winston to fetch a poinsettia for Monica, but decided after receiving the orchid that I would stay with real flowers only. No fake ones at all. After setting up the main scene, I noticed the mini roses in the flower arrangement one of our sons had sent us for Christmas. It had sprays of miniature roses. They were beautiful when the arrangement first arrived....
But the arrangement was already over ten days old, and the mini roses had shrivelled and dried up....perfect for my little story...
It was tricky taking photos in such tight quarters, as I needed to use my tripod in order to get the sharpest photos, but there wasn't any room to back up from any distance at all. Then there was the huge hanging light to deal with too. It provided warm lighting from above, but I still needed the photography spot-light from the side to prevent harsh shadows from the light above.
... and I had to shoot with the table on an angle, so I'd get the kitchen windows and door in the background, and not the bright yellow wall to the right. Which meant it wasn't wide enough to take horizontal format photos....
...unless I took close-ups....
But the entire settup was so nice, that I wanted photos of the entire scene....
...which meant some major cropping....
The set was on the end of the kitchen table for three days, so Jan and I had to eat all our meals at the end of Monica's conservatory the entire time. This was the very last photo I took....
and cropped into a square, it ended up being my favourite of the entire photo shoot...
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