The blog of photographer Kim Ayres

Megalicious - the garden photo shoot

March 21st 2020 was supposed to be the launch of Megalicious – my daughter Meg's gluten free home baking and pop-up cafe business.

It was cancelled one week before because of the corona virus, Covid 19 – see But Out Of The Window Everything Looks Normal

Following the launch, Dumfries & Galloway Life magazine had intended to do an article on Meg, but we assumed that would just be shelved.

However, they got in touch to say they'd still like to do a piece on Meg's baking, if she could supply a recipe for one of bakes, and I could do some photos of her making it.



While it was relatively straightforward to take some shots of Meg pouring and mixing ingredients, my real love is creating narrative, storytelling images, so Maggie, Meg and I started discussing if we could do something special to accompany the article. And if it wasn't suitable for D&G Life at that time, we could still use it for publicity for Megalicious at a later date.

Ideas started bouncing back and forth, and soon the notion came together of Meg sitting in an armchair in the garden, with a cake stand of gluten-free brownies, flapjack and cake, a high stack of cookery book, and a mass of baking trays and cake tins piled up on another chair.

The article would be in the June issue, but at the time we decided to set up the photos, it was early April and there still weren't any leaves on the trees. So we decided to do the shoot by the garden shed instead so it wouldn't be immediately connected with a particular time of the year.

Chairs, table, books, pans, baking, teapot and a Megalicious mug were all shipped into the garden and set up, but it took me quite a while to work out the lighting.

The bright sunshine was continually being obscured by passing clouds, which changed the lighting conditions. And by the time I'd adjusted for it the sun would reappear.

In the end I created a set up based around the sun being out and we just waited each time it disappeared behind the clouds.

Fortunately Meg is a very patient model and is completely unselfconscious in front of the camera. I guess it helps she'd been used to me photographing her since she was a baby.

This was the final result



and to our great delight, they decided to use it for the cover of the June 2020 issue



And to give you a behind-the-scenes insight, Maggie did a bit of filming using my old camera



I'll be talking about this shoot in my Facebook Live podcast on Tuesday evening. If you miss it, go to my YouTube channel - youtube.com/kimayres - and look for episode 7.
Or check the next blog post...

2 comments

Z said...

That is so lovely and fabulous photos. We've never been facebook friends, Kim, though we've know each other a long time online. I'll look you up. Different surname from my email.

Kim Ayres said...

Z - Look forward to meeting you there :)

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