Flat out Wednesday

Canon 1Ds II, 24-70mm, available light with on reflector used to cut light off the face and create some shadows.

After two days on the road shooting location portraits for a corporate client, I'm back in front of the Mac all day today. I had a great time shooting, meeting with some truly interesting and successful can-do people. On a road trip like this locations pose their own special problems. The main one being you rarely have the opportunity to pre-plan the shot and although working from a written set of instructions as to what each image was to contain and how it was to be shot, you still find yourself making it up as you go.

Firstly the designer who was providing the instructions hadn't been to any of the locations or met any of the subjects... so they were providing ideas based on not actually knowing what was available on location, which makes it hard to stay on script. For example one of the shots required a couple to be photographed in front of their home, and provided a very good description of how the house should look in the background. The problem of course was that on arrival the home although beautiful, didn't remotely resemble the designers description of what it should be.

The images were to be of real people in real locations so there was not going to be any shifting to another location to get a background more closely matching the designers layout. The solution, change the shot totally to still get the emotional feel the design was looking for while uses the real people and their real environment. Fortunately our client who was along with us while we shot was totally understanding, could see the problem, and was really happy with the work around.

The main challenge with location shooting is to retain the natural feel of the location and to try and make interesting images of people quickly and with out to much fuss. Most shoots lasted between 15 to 30 minutes including location checking, setup, shooting and pull down. the image above is of Tony Pumper, an engineer who is making a name for himself manufacturing custom built trailers fro the trucking industry. The machine in the background is a plasma cutter which can cut almost any shape from plate steel, quickly and so neatly that its hard to believe the final shape wasn't created meticulously by a master craftsman over many days.