Photoshoot trip

Okay. It’s here. The long awaited (hopefully much anticipated) blog about why I was chillin’ in a hotel room in southern Germany. And in response to some of your questions, it had nothing to do with that chocolate bar. We parted ways a long time ago. I felt it was better that way.

When Inge asked me what I was interested in doing during my stay in Germany, I mentioned that I was interested in maybe taking some photography courses or cinematography courses at the local university. She enquired, discovered that it would be prohibitively expensive for a foreign student, but asked an acquaintance of hers (who is in the design field) if he knew of a local photographer who I could do a practicum with. He said that his neighbour happened to have a photography/design business and that I should check it out. So, I sent him an email with my portfolio and introduced myself. He emailed back within a few days: “herzlichen Dank für Ihre Bewerbung. Ihre Bilder zeigen eine ambitionierte Auseinandersetzung mit dem Thema Fotografie. Bitte melden Sie sich doch einfach bei mir telefonisch, wenn Sie in Deutschland sind. Wir können uns dann gerne mal hier bei uns im Studio treffen und über die Möglichkeit eines Praktikums reden. Zunächst wünsche ich Ihnen eine gute Reise und freue mich auf Ihren Besuch bei uns.”

Okay, so that said that I should give him a call when I get to Germany. So, I met him in his studio the neighbouring village and discussed some more. “No problem, there’s plenty of work; we can always use an extra person. We’re doing a photo shoot shortly before Christmas, if you’re interested you can come along”

Uh, yeah, I’m interested.

So I spent a week working in the studio, getting to know Rolf (the boss), Buckhard (the photoshop master), and Fränzi (who does most of the portrait work that they get). I can ride with Buckhard, which is pretty sweet, as it saves me a lot of money and pain (the bus system is sparse). However, it means I have to work as long as he does, and they’re all workaholics. After a week I decided that I wasn’t here in Germany to spend most of my time in front of a computer and have no time for the Pabst family or other people. Starting next week I’ll be working there 3 days a week and 2 days a week here on the farm.
But as to what I do there. They specialize in advertisement photography, especially cars, campers, and boats. All the work is very technical and there is a lot of post-production work in Photoshop. A lot. For instance, in December we quickly took some pictures of two new yachts in the parking lot of the yacht factory in Giebelstadt. Then, returning to the studio, we plunked ourselves down in front of the computer, cut out the boat from it’s surrounding, found a matching picture of another yacht (cruising around in Spain), and plunked our boat into the water. We took our pictures under an overcast sky, and the pictures from Spain were sunny, so we had to add reflections, shadows and whatnot to make it look realistic. I spent the better part of three days working on these boats. In the end we delivered eight final pictures. You can see them at:

http://2bavaria-yachtbau.com/index.php?id=599&L=1
http://2bavaria-yachtbau.com/index.php?id=902&L=1 (the top 3 pics)

Most of the time I work pictures over in photoshop and do odd jobs that need to be done. Buckhard usually gives me a few pictures, shows me how it’s done on the first one, then lets me do the others. That’s how we did the boat pictures.
The photostudio itself is built into a large shed/barn attached to Rolf’s house in Albertshausen (the neighbouring village from Giebelstadt). There are two floors; a large room downstairs outfitted with a big white backdrop and numerous flash units, and upstairs another room with all our computers, archives, paper supplies, and printers. I’m sorry that I don’t have any pictures of it yet. I’ll get some next week and put them up.

On Saturday, Dec 16th we got up early and drove 2.5 hours south to Bad Waldsee. We arrived at a big hall with two campers in it that we were supposed to photograph and promptly unpacked the Sprinter that we had rented to carry all our equipment and got to work. We had to shoot the interior of two vehicles; a camper trailer (about 25’ long) and a camper van (also about 25’ long). These were Hymer Gold Editions, due to come out early this year in celebration of Hymer’s 50th anniversary. Each one costs over $25000 CDN. For each shot, we would set up one or two flood lights (8000 W each) to mimick the sun, a few softbox flashes to give some nice even light, and then various smaller spots to highlight certain areas of the camper. The whole camper looked like some alien thing with a dozen flash units shining through every possible window and cables and generators all over the place. I didn’t take any pictures, as these are campers that aren’t available yet and I didn’t know if I was allowed, but now I wish I did. It was sweet. Apparently photographing the interior of yachts and campers is some of the hardest photography in the advertisement business, and I can see why. Space is very confined, lighting is extremely difficult, and everything has to be exactly right so that you get something that looks professional. Each perspective that we shot from took approximately 2 hours to set up and shoot. As a result, we shot the remaining of Saturday, all day Sunday, all day Monday, and half the day Tuesday, putting in 12 hour days most of the time. We stayed at this hotel in the old part of town in the pedestrian zone. Here is the view from my room.





We got breakfast served to us at the hotel (a very nice breakfast, too, which made me exceedingly happy) and we ate dinner at various restaurants; once German, then Italian, then Greek. Good stuff. Naturally, Rolf paid for us all. One morning as it was still dark, I went out with my camera and took some more shots. Here are some.









The town square. In the foreground you can see the remains of what used to be a curling ice rink where some men were playing some form of curling with big wooden curling stones.





A random bench...





I presume that this used to be some sort of church/monastery. It now serves as an apartment block.





Each window on this house has been decorated and given a number, making it into a huge advents calendar. You can see the boring left side in the next picture





Another view of the main street, seen from the other direction. On the left is the house that has been made into an Advent's calendar.





And this is the final number; 24th being Christmas in Germany.




And that's that. We finished up with our post-production work late Tuesday (Buckhard sat at his computer the whole weekend long and worked the images as we took them, but he didn't get everything done, so we stayed later on Tuesday to get that finished). We uploaded the files from the warehouse, and headed home, arriving at about 11:00. As there was not much to do in the next few days, I started my Christmas vacation on Wednesday, and had my first meal together with the Pabst family since I left for Switzerland on the 4th.