Zulu Design | Whats in a Photoshoot? | Photography Tutorial

How many of you have been on a photo-shoot? Have you ever been surprised at the costs involved, or wondered where all the money goes? Have you ever honestly looked at a picture and thought, ‘that’s good, but I could do that with my digital camera’?

With the proliferation of digital cameras now replacing film and permeating into nearly every household across the UK, and with the massive advancement in mobile phone technology which brings us closer and closer to one device that does it all (I mean I’ve even got an application on my iPhone that controls my TV - who needs the remote anymore?), who needs a photographer? Can’t we do their jobs ourselves?

The camera never lies

My digital camera cost £300 and it takes a 1metre image at 72 dpi. That means it’ll give me a 24 cm wide image at 300dpi, - plenty big enough for a brochure. Whilst this is often the thought process of many a client, it doesn’t mean that just because the resolution is there, the shot is any good. For example, if you took the shot indoors, there may well be a yellow cast over the image because of the fluorescent lighting in the room. If the photo was of a person, was he/she smiling, or did they look like they didn’t really want to be there? Were they dressed appropriately, or were they wearing a Megadeth t-shirt, while trying to sell a Classic FM album?

Get the picture?

There is a big difference in photography and the requirement of photography, and it’s an issue that I come across everyday. When producing a brochure, the addition of good quality, well-shot and relevant photography can (and does) make the difference between a boring dull product and an award-winning piece. A lot of design awards for print work go to projects that have stunning photography as part of their makeup. We are a visual culture and as much as we would wish to deny it, we react based on what we see first. Eddie Izzard quoted in one of his shows that 70% of what people react to is the look, how you look; and 20% is about how you sound; and only 10% is what you say. So if you look good and sound good, everyone will go wild! That’s advertising in a nutshell.

There are pictures, and then there are pictures

There are basically two types of photography and to illustrate this we are going to use a mug as our star attraction. The first approach sees us record the mug in photographic form for the sake of history. It is needed to make a permanent record that this particular mug existed on the planet, at a certain time on a certain day, almost frozen in time, so in 1000 years time, when future humans open up the time capsule, they’ll know we all used mugs!

This doesn’t require any real specialism and pretty much anybody with a camera phone that’s not older than 2 years, will have the ability to capture this, with some degree of quality. It’s never going to do anything else but exist as a recording that it was there. There’s no need for special lighting, we don’t need props, or models, - just a camera and the mug.

The importance of a good photo

The second option is to see our mug as the latest and greatest, most stylish and sophisticated mug ever made. We’ll need to sell a million of them, and we’ll do this by convincing you, the consumer, that everything I just said about my poor little mug is true. So I’ll either have to find myself a studio, or maybe I’ll shoot it on location with an idyllic scene in the background (the mug could look good resting on a palm tree, with white golden sandy beaches and crystal blue waters in the background!). I need to emphasise its best points and hide its worst (but if you asked me directly, I’d of course say it has no bad points). I need you to see this mug in an advert and say “wow, that’s the mug for me” and rush out and buy it.

These two options have two very different outcomes.

There are a series of steps that go into a photo-shoot and to show you how involved it is, I’ll demonstrate a recent project we have done for a client.

Background/Brief

Our project is to produce a car park image where one of the car parking bays is occupied by a giant rat-trap. The shot was to be shot at nighttime and have a gritty yet realistic look to it.

Styling

The first thing to discuss with the client is the tone to the image. This is normally achieved by collating a mood board of imagery that encompasses the tone, style, lighting etc that ultimately, the finished shot is trying to achieve.

Recce

Once this has been agreed, the next stage is to find the location. This can be a fairly short stage (i.e., if it were only a studio shot we were after, we’d just need a studio and the photographers would usually have access to his/her own). Otherwise, we’d be trying to find the perfect scenario ‘on location’, such as a modern flat, a high-rise shot of a tower block. This can be accomplished with existing local knowledge and general research (using the Internet for example) or actually employing a company, which specialises in location finding and hiring for film and TV shows.

The potential site then needs to be visited and recce shots taken to see if the final composition for the image can be achieved and whether it matches up 100% with the brief, or only 70% and additional items will need to be brought in to fulfil the requirements.

The recce shots are then shown to the client via web upload in most instances. This way, the client gets no surprises and can confirm the shot is progressing as expected.

The following are the recce shots I took at the first stage of this particular project.

Permission

This can be a very long stage depending on the location/organisation, but it is a key point nevertheless.

In our case, we needed permission from a large retail food outlet to use their car park. At the beginning on the discussion, we made it clear that we would make sure there would be no key features to show that the car park belonged to the retailer, and permission was given.

The Shoot

Setting up is the time consumer here. Depending on the image, setup can take anything from a few hours to a full day. In the case of our rat-trap photo-shoot, we took 3.5hrs to setup, arranging the bay parking correctly and getting enough cars to stay in place without making it look like they have specifically been positioned. Then a series of tests shots with different lighting configurations were performed, to get the shot composition we were happy with. Obviously while all this was going on, members of the public doing their weekly shop were interested in what we were doing, and often stopped to ask us about the shoot.

Many people aren’t aware of the skill involved in taking a nighttime shot. You have a very short window of opportunity, where it’s dark, but the sky is still blue. If you miss this window, then the image can look quite flat as you lose the depth to the shot. This ‘late dusk window’ is around about 20mins.

As you can see from the shots below, the ‘Money Shot’ (which is generally called the ‘Hero Shot’, but I think the ‘Money Shot’ is more appropriate - as my old Creative Director used to say, it’s the shot that brings in the dosh!) has lots of equipment in the way of the two cars which feature heavily in the scene. These are removed in the final stages of production.

Studio Shot

The rat-trap element is then setup in a studio and photographed from a variety of angles and then quickly ‘comped’ into a ‘low-res’ shot of the car park location to see if it fits. In this case, we took nearly 500 shots before we settled on the final one. Again, this takes in the region of a full day, plus half a day to find the right type of trap of course (an old iron monger was the winner in this case).

Retouch

The final stage of the process is to supply both elements (the location ‘Money Shot’ and the rat-trap) to a high-end retoucher, along with the mood/style boards, which we started the process with. The retoucher is a very skilled individual, who spends a considerable amount of time to put a shine on the final shot. You can see bad examples of retouching whenever you watch a film and they show a family photo album where George Clooney’s childhood photos have been stuck on someone else’s body!

The following images show the various stages of the process before we arrive at the finished shot. The shot can and is amended as the retoucher will ask the agency if this is what they are after and usually, a brief is established for the retoucher to work against. There are small tweaks/removals which are inevitable with any retouching, and in our case, registration plate details needed to be removed so that the cars featuring within the image cannot be identified.

Before

After

Stages

Presentation

Once all this is done, then and only then, do we present the finished shot to the client. It is hoped that the constant communication throughout the process means that the final shot is exactly what they were after. In this case it was!

Picture perfect

Photography is very important and the power of a good image should never be underestimated. A good image can change our outlook in the quickest of moments. It can stop us from drinking alcohol or smoking, it can make us desire and buy, or it can just make us stop and ponder. Either way, it forces us to engage in it’s subject and form our own opinions, and by doing so, it does what it was created to do…be seen.

 

Back to Latest Blog

Comments (13)