CIRCUMSTANCES
It is not only the weather which often creates problems on
location. Plenty of other criteria can ruin situations,
regardless of how carefully a shoot has been planned. This is
especially true when I am in places that are unfamiliar to me
before the moment of arrival.
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© 2006 Gert Wagner All Rights Reserved.
A good deal of flexibility is required to
People in an image can give the viewer a new
perspective of a location and give life to an image, so
don’t be too quick to walk away from a shot that includes
the activities of people.
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Connemara in Western Ireland is home of the Galway Hooker, an ancient type of sailing vessel still in the possession of some obsessed collectors. Once a year they assemble for the famous Hooker races. I was eager to shoot the event. To my disappointment, after having left the harbor, the picturesque flotilla continued its race far out at sea. Even with my 300 mm lens I could hardly trace them on their course down the coast. But I continued shooting until they finally vanished over the horizon. In the end, I came to like those tiny silhouettes under the broad sky of the Irish Atlantic.
A summer evening at the Danish seaside with the beautiful light of a retired sun – ideal for the long awaited nature shot. But what about those people on the beach disturbing my vision? I had no choice and decided for a different approach by just integrating them. In fact, this version turned out to be the more interesting scene. Determination is good, so is flexibility.
A cold storage facility image
proved to be more difficult to get while on a corporate
assignment. Yes, it was cold and a rather dull photographic
location! But once I found this workman in his red insulated
clothing, the location and final image came to life and fully
demonstrated the artic temperatures within which he worked.
A little luck and the phrase Patience is a Virtue applies! Some of the toughest surprises waited for me on a world tour, shooting for a calender project for a mineral oil corporation. The twelve themes were to cover the long path crude oil takes to get from the gusher through the refining process and finally to the gas station. Each picture, printed on a glossy super size format, had to be an artistically-interpreted record of a fundamentally unattractive crude oil scene. I had won this job by describing to my client breathtaking images of silver pipelines stretching to the horizon into the setting sun, and of a hightech pump in the middle of the abstract ice-covered surface of Alaska looking like a modern cathedral. However, not long after departure I began to realize the huge gap between my lavish imagination and harsh reality.
