Man is one with his work!

A while back, I shot a personal project of a friend of mine, Jim Mumford. Jim owns a business in San Diego called Good Earth Plants. Good Earth Plants is San Diego's largest provider of interior landscape design, installations and maintenance services. They also design living walls and roofs, which are plant beds and gardens located on walls and on roofs. 

This guy is super passionate about what he does and it shows in his work. I came up with an idea of photographing him immersed in his work. Literally, growing out of one of his projects. We met at his shop and looked at some ideas. He thought I was crazy but went along with my ideas. My original thought was squeezing him in a wall unit like the one pictured below.

This option had some issues like how were we going to fit Jim behind the wall. Also, we would have to take out some of the 18x18" crates that held the plants and then fill in the empty voids around Jim. On a vertical surface, that was tricky without strapping and taping plants on to the other crates and on Jim. There were some other vertical, wall options but each one was had its own obstacles. I left his shop that day and told Jim I had to rethink my plan.


A few days later Barbara and I were talking and she said "Why don't you just lay him down and bury him in plants?" Duh! That's why she makes the big bucks. Since part of Jim's business is plantscaping, or leasing plants to businesses and homes, he has a huge inventory of plants at his shop. We made up a plan to lay him down on the ground and surround him with plants making it look as if he were standing in one of his walls.


We started by putting down a tarp on the concrete pad. This made cleanup of all the spilled soil much, much easier. We then laid Jim down on the tarp and covered him in a dark brown sheet. The sheet was to keep the soil off of him and keep him clean. Since one of the shots called for him to be pruning the plants around him, we cut holes in the sheet so he could poke is arms out. 


Then came the fun part! We began stacking plants all around and over him. Placing plants on him proved tricky because they wouldn't stay upright and kept falling over whenever he moved the slightest. We chose to cover him in seedum with the intention of doing some retouching in post to fill in the voids with plants. 

We shot in the afternoon so the sun was present. The sun was not ideal for this situation because there was so much detail and layers with the plants. The sun and shadows would have made a very busy distracting photo. Fortunately, we were shooting underneath a shade enclosure that Jim stored all of his plants under. There was one strip between the shade scrim and the building where light was pouring in on Jim. We hung a big black sheet on light stands to block that out. 

You can see Jim's face to the right of the ladder

Now that we blocked out all of the undesirable light, it was time to create some good light! I set up a 7' Octodome of to one side of Jim as the main light. To create fill, I placed white panels at his feet and opposite the octobox. I initially set up a large softbox for fill but decided that the lite panels provided enough fill.  As you can see below, I shot from about 8-9' above Jim. I kept my aperture at f/16 to retain sharpness from top to bottom of frame. His feet were closer than his face, so I needed the extra depth of field.

Here a few of the final images along with the photo used for the San Diego Horticultural Society magazine.

Jim told us before he had an engagement that night so we had a limited timeframe. Thanks to the hard work from Barbara and Pari, Jim's office manager, we were able to stage and shoot everything in about 45 minutes. We pulled the plants and sheet off of Jim, he shook out a bit of soil out of his hair and he was off with time to spare!