I opted to set up this blogger site instead of using wordpress like I had done before, because it makes everything so much less lame on the main site. Anyhoo, I wanted to re-post the one about the Apple Valley calendar cover because people seem to like it and it was one of those real fun problem photos.Basically, they had a "Green Apple Valley" theme to encourage people to be more environmentally conscious, so I had to come up with something along those lines. After throwing out the idea of having a little girl and her mother walking through a cemetary picking green apples out of hands protruding from the ground, around sunset with butterflies and happy creatures in the air, I settled on having a girl sitting on Bell Mountain with the entire valley in the background having just taken a bite of an apple that is emitting a light from within. I just didn't feel like hiking.
Eventually, I drove by Lions Park which is right next to a hill one of the founders of Apple Valley had built a house on. People like nostalgia, so that worked well. Next was the damn apple light. I couldn't carve out a real apple and stick anything in there because it would just be mushy and messy and probably lead to a few shocks, so I went to Michael's for inspiration. There, I found foam apples which I could just gut and then pop in one of those halogen display lights from Home Depot. So that's what I did. One thing anyone should know, however, is that there is a concrete blob in the center that has to come out too. You just scrape away enough of the styrofoam around it to pull it out by hand and it'll slide right out.
To power it, I hooked it up to Mark's power inverter and connected it to his car, then put a strobe with an umbrella above Amber to counter the glow from the sun that had just set behind her. The halogen light in the apple is cool, because it's already a lower color temperature than the strobe so it shoots out warm, glowy light so a little piece of .25 CTO made it warmer. That's about it, except for some curves and color adjustments in post, adding a little beam and hiding some of the cord from the apple light that popped into view. The rest was taped to her arm and ran around her back and along the back of the log.
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