Gardener’s Pad
The big jobs are always great to do, and they certainly help to keep the enthusiasm going during times when jobs are all run-of-the-mill type stuff. Don’t get me wrong - I still enjoy shooting 3-bed semis close to home, but it’s nice to pack the car with plenty of gear and drive to a task that takes a fair bit of experience to complete.
Gardener’s Cottage is a sizeable house with outbuildings and a huge walled garden within the grounds of the medieval Brancepeth Castle in County Durham. There are a number of other houses and holiday lets on the expansive grounds, and this one - as its name suggests - was previously the home of the head gardener.
I was praying for some sunshine, and as I headed the 50 miles south down the A1, I encountered every single weather condition that the UK could throw at me along the way - torrential rain, hail, wind, and strong sunshine. The sun prevailed in the end, and as soon as I arrived, I got the external shots in the bag. This is my priority now, as the brochure cover shot is the most important image of them all. I brought the Hasselblad just in case and shot some nice frames using the 21mm f/4.
The wind was getting stronger as a storm approached, so the drone went up straight away for the vital aerial frames.
My estimate for the job time was 2 hrs and 15 minutes. I’m pretty good at estimating this now using the size of the property, the state of readiness, lighting conditions, and so forth. The owners were a lovely, down-to-earth retired couple who had been there for yonks and who were downsizing to somewhere down south as I remember. The garden was massive and needed constant care to maintain its immaculate appearance.
Inside, there were several reception rooms, dining spaces, six bedrooms, a compact kitchen, orangery, and some challenging lighting scenarios which needed the extra power of my Godox AD400 Pro to illuminate. There were also quite a few rooms which would have required too much time to de-clutter, and would require the help of generative AI to remove items. The dining room contained a ma-hoosive exercise machine which was immovable, and Adobe Firefly 5 managed to get rid of it just nicely. I don’t have any qualms about using AI as long as it’s just being employed to remove distractions, and there’s no alteration of the material structure of the room.
I managed to finish the job in almost exactly 2 hrs and 15 mins in the end. The sun had come round to the front of the house, so I repeated the exteriors in between cloud-cover moments, packed up, and headed home to edit everything. A good result.
