In order to do a professional photo shoot, you need good photography equipment, the best models you can get, and a location that offers a proper background.
A good background is not easy to find, so we often have to go out and look for locations, where we can do shootings at a later date.
Some of the places where we go looking for these locations are very beautiful, at times surprising, and at other times absolutely spectacular.
Lavender is an aromatic flower that blooms in July, and has many aesthetic and cosmetic uses, making it an excellent subject for a stock shoot. So on this occasion, at the end of July we went to Brihuega, a small village in Guadalajara in the centre of Spain, famous for its lavender fields.
Although our initial choice was the French Provence, where there is much more countryside, last minute technical problems made us decide to go to a destination within our borders.
Normally we make a first trip to look for locations and another one later for the shoot, but this time as an exception we organised a single 5-day trip in which we would look for locations on the first day, and do the photo shoots on the following days.
This was because the lavender flowering period was coming to an end, and we had run out of time to organise 2 separate trips. So we arrived just in time, as there were already quite a few harvested fields, and some were being harvested while we were there.
This is what a freshly harvested lavender field looks like. Nothing to do with the glamour of the fields in bloom.
By moving around with all the photo and video equipment, we were able to record shots of the surroundings while we looked for the most suitable fields for the sessions and we were organising everything.
Looking for fields, we found some beautiful places where we enjoyed shooting and photographing just for fun, such as Civica, an old abandoned village in Guadalajara carved into the rock, preceded by a beautiful waterfall.
After many kilometres and calculations regarding the orientation of the fields in relation to the sun, we found the ideal ones in which to shoot at different times of the day.
I must say that it was really pleasant to shoot among lavender fields, in which most of the time, we were completely alone..
The tranquillity, the light of dawn and dusk, the meticulous order of the crops in perfectly equidistant strips of lavender, the millions of bees that frantically fluttered around with a surprisingly sonorous incessant buzzing, and the flowers stirred by the wind allowed us to get very beautiful shots in a relaxing and motivating environment like few others.
It was quite difficult to find the right fields for each hour of the day, since it was necessary to calculate the orientation of the furrows so that the incidence of light would be appropriate for each sunrise or sunset, which are the hours of best light.
And when the expected sunset came, or very early at dawn, we took advantage of each one of them to enjoy the landscape, and one of the things we like most, photography.
In successive blog entries, we will show you in short videos some of the locations we found, and later, we will tell you how the session was done.
In this video you can see some of the shots we filmed in the search for the ideal lavender field.
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