Chris And Carole Brown run a small family Cider Farm from their home in North Curry Somerset.
Their daughter Alice contacted me after seeing my request online for people for my project Life In A Somerset Landscape
To add extra resolution to the camera resolution of my DJI Phantom 4 Pro I decided to capture this aerial scene in nine individual frames.
Some high-end retouching was then applied to the frames and then colour graded.
I could never image capturing images from the air years ago let alone being able to capture separate perfectly registered frames.
Aerial-landscape-burrow-hill-south-somerset
We have had some fantastic summer light this last few weeks and I just had to take advantage of it to capture some aerial images and video and experiment a little.
In a few weeks, I’m heading to one of if not my favourite place on earth Rhodes in Greece.
Greek history & myths have been a passion of mine passed on from my dad since a child and the reason I became a photographer but that’s another slightly strange story.
Over the years I’ve travelled to many of the sites both on mainland Greece, the islands and also Turkey too but Rhodes has always been my favourite.
This trip I have several locations I wish to photograph and film and I plan to do this with the drone.
So I’ve been busy checking my aviation maps for any airspace restrictions for my proposed locations and planning the timings for the best light.
Not one to ever be satisfied I’ve been looking at extracting extra resolution from the drone’s already impressive camera hence the experimenting.
The latest image is of Burrow Hill in Somerset which I’ve shot many times but never from the air.
My experiment to extract extra resolution and quality from the drone was a success and one I’m going to use again where appropriate.
This week the weather finally looked perfect and we got to shoot the old Cider Orchard I mentioned in a previous post.
I arrived on my own at the orchard just after sunrise and spent nearly two hours in the beautiful autumn light capturing all the images I would need ready for the composite.
I should explain again that the plan was to capture the orchard now while full of Apples and then photograph the guys from Richies Cider when things quieten down for them after the harvest.
The shoot was pretty simple and most the time was spent trying to create nice clean compositions as there was just so many trees full of fruit close to each other that it was a little too much !
We now have to create our backdrop from the images captured and arrange to return to Richies Cider Farm in a few weeks to capture the images of the guys to complete our vision for the final image.
It’s been a busy week here at Monks Yard researching locations and contacting people for several shoots we have ideas for.
For the last 18 months or more we have been working on a project titled “Life in A Somerset Landscape”
The title pretty much speaks for itself but the concept is basically to photograph well known or iconic Somerset landscapes with either people or animals in them.
Withy weaver PH Coates Withy growers Somerst
Of course in line with my style of imagery these images are often composited scenes made up from sometimes many elements to create the idyllic and quiet moments that make up my vision.
When I first started on my career some 25 or so years ago I would often shoot for the Somerset Tourism Departments and met some wonderful & colourful characters including a guy called Gordon Rich.
Gordon was a Somerset Cider Maker and owner of Richies Cider Farm and was Somerset as they come!
Maybe it was because I was young and just starting out with my somerset photography business but he was always very accommodating whenever I turned up to photograph him and always had some fantastic stories to tell.
Unfortunately, he’s no longer with us but the Cider Farm still continues to thrive under the families management.
The project just had to feature Cidermaking at some point as it’s what Somerset is best known for. After a quick chat with Gordon’s family and showing the images captured in the project so far they were happy for me to go ahead with my idea.
Today we did a recce of one of their oldest Cider Orchards which is currently brimming with apples ready to be harvested for cider making.
This time of year is perfect timing for the trees being full of apples but bad timings for the guys as they are very very busy harvesting and pressing the apples. Due to this, we plan to return at dawn when the weather is favourable to capture the orchards and return when this year’s busy harvest period is over to photograph some of the guys and composite the two images in post-production …how things have moved on since my days shooting Gordon on my old 6×6 film camera!
