My assignment for this week for Documentary Photo was to
photograph an interesting place and the people in it. I tried to think of an interesting place that
was going to be visually appealing and have people around it. After tossing around a few ideas, my sister
helped my come up with the one I really liked: Simmon’s Farm. It is a farm in McMurray and this past
weekend it opened up all of its fall activities. The farm itself is set on a larger piece of
land, surrounded by a few of McMurray’s larger homes. It features a hayride, a corn maze, a petting
zoo, pumpkin and apple picking, and a variety of other events for the fall
season.
For pumpkins, they offer pick your own. I didn’t see where exactly they had this set
up so I just browsed the pre-picked ones that they had. They had a bunch of different little pumpkins
along with miniature gourds. They had regular
old orange pumpkins in all sizes and a bunch of strange looking ones, some of
which I had never seen before.
The next interesting event we stopped at was the butterfly
tent. It was sort of aplastic greenhouse
where they had hatched hundreds of butterflies.
They had some larger Monarchs, and similar looking Painted Ladies. The young child working in the tent showed us
how the Painted Ladies looked like Monarchs with their wings open but when they
were closed, they looked like moths to protect themselves from predators. You can also feed the butterflies nectar from
your fingertip or just pick them up if you wanted. This would be a great place to bring kids!
After the butterfly house, we decided to pick apples, since
it was something we hadn’t done before.
We got our bag, watched a short instruction video, (err…or not. We decided to skip this) and headed out to
the orchards. They had a few varieties
that could be picked, the only one I remember they for sure had was
Jonagold. It was interesting to go out
and try to pick the “perfect” apples – or just pick them at all! It is definitely
harder than it seems like it’d be! We
were a little unsure of how many apples we were getting, and it seemed a little
pricey ($10.50 for a peck), which turned out to actually be a lot more apple
than we expected. We also had a fun time
trying the different apples out in the orchards (probably not safe…) and
figuring out which we liked best. Who
knew there were so many varieties of apple and that they all have different
tastes.
Last, they also had hay rides. We didn’t go on one, but they were pretty
crowded. I would like to go back and go
on one to see how far the farm actually goes and see the great views. I wish I would have gotten more photos of
people, but I am shy, and people have a tendency to assume you are a creep if
you start taking photos of them and/or their kids.
One softbox modeling light at medium-high power from above left.
