Shooting outside

29 Apr Shooting outside

Once, a friend of a dear friend and client of ours came back from a very tough and demanding bicycle-singles tournament at the Canadian eastern coast. We were really impressed by the amazing pictures he showed us and I expressed my admiration of the beautiful natural northern light. But this guy just snored and told us that the photographer drove from one shooting point to another and filled the forest with flashes generated by a diesel generator…

It happened to us, not so long ago, while one of our colleagues said that we are doing magic shooting day light pictures, while most of our work is done at the studio, working hard to make it look just like he thought it was: a daylight shot.

But from time to time we are asked to shoot views and nature, just like it happened in the recent “AHAVA Dead Sea Laboratories” new branding project (art direction: Studio Avigail)­­.
We were asked to provide pictures of the Dead Sea that will follow the Dead Sea Laboratories marketing vision throughout the new branding concept. We figured it out and asked the client for an unlimited budget for a four-season shooting schedule, small lighting crew and one four wheel drive generator truck. We didn’t get it.

So, there is always the absurd conflict between forcing nature to look natural using electric flashes, Cool-White movie projectors, reflectors, diffusers and so on, and trying to catch nature at its best..

Here it is, the little magnificent robin that made our little back yard its home. I shot its picture with my G11. Maybe if I would have cleaned the window glass before… and used another camera with another lens; and I could have used a flash light from the bathroom window so it would look like a wonderful sunbeam. Or, I would wait here ready with the right camera hiding behind a curtain between 10:30- 10:55 am (the time in which the sun reaches our lemon tree) for several days. Did you get the point?

So we went down to the lowest place in world, first just for an initial impression, together with cameras, Dave the copyrighter and Avigail Marsha from Studio Avigail, which is responsible for AHAVA’s new branding process. After the initial visit, Avigail tightened up her unique visual concept and got AHAVA’s O.K. That is where Guy Raz, a location producer (who happened to be born and grew up in Kibutz Ein-Gedi, just beside the Dead Sea) got into the picture. We sent him our brief and he went out for two days, scouting for appropriate views applicable to our brief. We joined his truck for the third day, planning the final details and determining the shooting spots for the two shooting days ahead with Eilam to guide us. The only unknown was the weather: sunny, cloudy, hazy? Heaven knows.