Garden 2020 - My COVID-19 Photography Project

When the city of Los Angeles announced that it would ask non-essential businesses to close due to the COVID-19 pandemic, things felt pretty apocalyptic. It was unusually dark and rainy in Southern California, matching most peoples feelings about what was going on. Things were very uncertain and I don’t think I was alone in feeling scared. After a few days the rain let up and it felt more like a typical spring in LA. My head still felt pretty cloudy and the future still very unclear, but the thing that struck me in those moments at home was that nature was doing her work in my garden, going about her normal business. Bees were doing their thing, plants growing quickly thanks to all the rain, and flowers blooming. The smell of our rose garden and jasmine vines blooming was intoxicating. I was still shooting client work from home, but found myself with extra time to work for myself in my home studio. I haven’t felt like I had time for a personal project in years and thought that documenting our garden in spring of 2020 was an easy place to start.

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 Technical Photography Details

Camera: Fujifilm X-T2
Lenses: XF35mm F1.4, XF23mm F2.0
Image Processing: Capture One Pro 20
Final Edits: Photoshop CC 2020

I shot two images, the first to light the subject, and the second in silhouette to make masking in Photoshop easier. Because the clippings would sometimes start to whither as soon as they were cut, I had to act quickly to keep them from looking dead. Even so, there would sometimes be some movement between the main shot and the silhouette shot, and if you look closely you can see the mask is mis-aligned. I decided to only correct the worst of these issues, and leave the more subtle ones because it reminded me a bit of vintage botanical prints that were printed slightly out of register. I shot tethered into Capture One Pro 20, Applied some contrast and sharpening adjustments and then processed out JPGs. I brought both JPGs into Photoshop CC 2020 and using the silhouette images, created a layer mask that isolated the plant, and replaced the background with a solid color. I did a few other contrast and sharpness adjustments and came up with these finals images.