Farm Fresh Blog

Photographing dead people was my bread & butter for many years. You can actually get kinda artistic with it. More than once we joked about making a Crime Scene calendar for the unit where we selected our best shots of the year to submit. I distinctly recall one of my favorite shots was a picturesque view of the bayou winding its way to the skyline of the city with the afternoon sun behind the buildings. It was a Chamber Of Commerce shot. And if you looked really closely, you could see a body floating in the bayou. It was some of my best work.

(No, I can't show you.)

That said, there are a lot of things more fun than taking pictures of dead people, for instance, taking pictures of soap. I know. I know. The lighting is better. The smell is better. You can rearrange things the way you want. I mean really, what's not to like?

One of the best parts of selling soap is photographing the individual fragrances. Frankly, one bar pretty much looks like another with slight variations in color or shape, but I like to compose a still life to represent each fragrance. I'm going to have to start over again with many of them because I lost the laptop that had the original photographs and all I had left of some of those shots are grainy photographs that I took with my cell phone. (But you still get the idea!)

 Take just plain soap,

and jazz it up with some props!

Rosemary Mint -

Cucumber Mint -

Barbed Wire -

Lavender & Oatmeal -

Sweetgrass, Cedar, & Sage -

Fred, the garden gargoyle, helped me take these shots for my Dragon's Blood fragrance:

Just clean soap porn! Can't you just smell it?

I'm really thankful for Clover, my first dairy goat, who introduced me to the world of making goat milk soap and a different angle on ranching. When I was raising meat goats, the babies were sold and probably eaten. (which can be a downer) You raised a baby or two from one mother and your profit was just the price of the baby. With dairy goats, not only can you sell the babies, but you can make much more money through the sale of dairy products or soap.  They require a lot more input and care for your profit, but the profit is greater and the time spent is far more pleasant.