We built this city




Just finished this shoot for centricity, it's a band called 16 cities. In brainstorming a concept for them I wanted to construct a city in photoshop made out of shots from 16 different cities. Sadly there wasn't budget for travel to 16 different cities. I almost always come up with an idea I love that's about 50 times the existing budget, I'm sure I annoy marketing directors to no end.

I have been drawing more influence lately from film and tv promo images so I wanted a glossy bright look that was slightly surreal.

After Steve Ford and I did some location scouting on a conveniently overcast day (we love overcast for shooting). I evaluated the test shots and I settled on this location for the city shot.

What made this shoot challenging, and there's always a challenge, was that the band would be in town for 2 days, only one of which they would be available for this shoot and this was only one of 4 set ups, 3 of which were outdoors. There's only about 2 hours in the evening and 2 hours in the morning that are good for light and that's assuming that it's not pouring rain. I was hoping for overcast actually. So I had to make an outdoor shoot work regardless of the weather on a fixed day.

Since it didn't look like it was going to be overcast, I had to do a lot of testing.

This location is 15 minutes from my house, I drove out there every 3 hours to shoot test pictures and evaluate the changing light. I rode my motorcycle so the task wasn't an onerous as one might think. The day before the shoot the band had a wardrobe fitting and while they were doing that, I did test shots of the band so we could evaluate wardrobe and I could get a sense of how I wanted to light them. When I got home, I made a test composite of this entire shot, so I would know how I wanted them to stand. We didn't have budget to block the road off so people and lights would have to move on and off the road and I would have to know what I wanted. It's hard to make decisions when you might get run over.

I had a backup plan to shoot everyone in studio and mimic overcast lighting in the studio and composite the shot. I tested that idea by pointing my biggest soft box at my large white ceiling to get the softest most diffuse lighting I could, similar to cloud cover. I took a picture of myself under those lighting conditions and then composited myself in. It looked hilarious and not in a good way. So we were going to have to use golden hour for this location. I was able to make the other location work primarily by shooting in the shade. (I had sent steve out to the location at 4pm to make sure this was possible). We arrived at our main location around an hour before I figured the light would be good.

We got everyone sorted through wardrobe and then did a series of test shoots to finalize where people would stand. Traffic wasn't too bad, but we definitely had to have spotters in each direction to let us know when cars were coming. We used white gaff tape to mark everyone's positions as well as lights and camera. I used 2 lights, one main fill on an umbrella and one rim light. My main light was an sb800 and my rim was a vivitar 285hv on boom stands so I could get the height and angle I wanted. I used the alien bees wireless units and they performed very nicely. We had people assigned to the lights and they would walk on and off with the talent when someone yelled "car!"

When the light started to get good, we shot a series of exposures in between cars. Then we would walk off and wait 10 minutes. As the sun starts to go down, it changes literally ever 10 minutes. So we'd walk everyone back out, reposition lights and camera and shoot for another 5 minutes. We shot some without lights, some with only key and so on. We were out there for probably two and a half hours. I was happy about 30 minutes into it, but I kept shooting till it got dark just to see if the light would get any better.

When I got back, I had a series of images with varying light conditions. There were 2 sets that gave me the look I wanted and I picked out a shot and got to work.

My B plan for the sixteen different cities was to have all my friends who are shooters send me their skyline shots and make one uber city out of that. Everyone agreed to send shots. All my friends are very very busy so in the end, only Jen Kroll made the deadline, so that's her shot of Chicago in the background. The sky I shot the week before. It was a little challenging to composite this in a way that looked natural. It doesn't look realistic at all, but I wanted it to look a little surreal. It was probably 8-10 hours of post for this single shot. I was sad to walk away from my concept of a single city made up of landmarks from 16 different cities but I realized that probably only one obsessive compulsive person would realize that it was made up of 16 different cities. People would probably just assume it was vegas...

I tend to get calls where people want me to come out for quick shoot, usually just one set up, 2-3 hours. I wanted to illustrate that for this single shot that I saw in my head I spent an entire day in pre production and an entire day in post production. Counting scouting and conceptualization, probably 24 hours of time went into this shot. That's 3 full work days. It's not the most profitable way to work, but it is the only way I know how to work. I conceptualize the idea, I test it usually to the point of mocking it up completely, than I shoot it and then overshoot it. Then I detail it, till it looks right to me. If you shoot enough, anyone can assemble a good portfolio from getting lucky. When the band is only in for one day then you can't bank on getting lucky.

Since I'm not the kind of person who gets lucky, this is how I deal with it.


Posted: Wed - June 10, 2009 at 01:58 PM          

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