CREATIVE COLLABORATION = THE BEST CAMPAIGN PHOTOGRAPHY
One of my favourite elements of our commercial photography business, LP Commercial Photography, is the opportunity to work on creating advertising material and campaign photography.
When done right, it sees you coming together to work with other creatives and the client to take basic concepts and create something unique and often more than you might have done on your own.
Bouncing around ideas and concepts with highly creative people, designers, creative directors and clients can sometimes be a little noisy, occasionally confrontational, however is always good fun and it challenges you to step up your game.
It’s also wonderful the way it can push you technically as a photographer as well as artistically. Once the end concept has grown and been nurtured in the cauldron of collaborative brainstorming, it then often falls to the photographer and their team to work out just how exactly those concepts are going to be created in the real world of the photoshoot.
The best part is when you deliver for your client - the concepts are realised and sometimes surpassed in the shoot and then they come back again and again because they know you can deliver.
This brings us to our third shoot with Brisbane based sports-wear company Zero Athletic and Vorgee. Previous shoots for the brand had seen us photograph in the crashing waves of the Gold Coast with daughter of business owners Bill and Lou, former Australian team member and world number one tri-athlete, Felicity Abrams. As well as hiking and mountain biking up hills and into bushland for an active clothing shoot and being slightly more serene in more studio style set-ups.
Our latest shoot with the brand was to capture the stills required for their designer, the wonderful Matt Roberts of www.robertstown.com.au to create a new set of advertising material for a revolutionary wetsuit aimed at open water swimmers and tri-athletes.
The brief was to have a series of shots which Matt could take into photoshop to show swimmers charging through the water and leaping into the air dragging a spinning vortex behind them. Outside of the brief, we also wanted to produce some general swimming images, close up detail shots and product photography of the new suits which could be used for social media and web exploitation and their online store.
So Bill called up his contacts at a local Brisbane swimming pool, we booked out their dive pool for the morning and off we went.
Talking about pushing myself, I do have a basic fear of heights…. Which is pretty silly when you consider the number of times in my career I’ve hung out of helicopters and stood at the top of wind turbines or been at the top of under construction buildings. Even more so, considering my love of bungee jumping and rock climbing in my youth…. But for me it’s actually a kind of middle height fear. So while I find being really high exhilarating, being a bit high scares me to death. Unfortunately for me the only way to get that perfect straight down shot of the swimmers on this occasion was to lie over the edge of a dive platform and photograph the swimmers as they went under me…. a middle height dive platform….. ahh, the things I do for the job :)
So we spent the morning shooting from high off the dive board, shooting in the water, level across the water and every other angle you can think of. We set up a studio in a quiet part of the pool area and shot the swimmers practicing their positions to give us back up shots for photoshop purposes to use if they couldn’t make the body shapes we needed in the actual pool. We even photographed shots of the water to make sure Matt had some good high resolution water texture pieces to use in Photoshop when bringing all the images together into a final montage piece for the advertising campaign.
It all went swimmingly well…. See our behind the scenes video below of the photoshoot fun.
