I would say 90% of my work involves a pre production scouting to tie down and to address any problems prior to the photo shoot. I this case minimum of 1.5 hours of driving plus traffic.
This is a working facility 24 hours a day, extremely cluttered and lots of coordination on the scouting shots to make this run seamless on the final photo shoot. I had 15 pages of scouting shots, our clients identified our final shoot list, and we set everything in motion. All of our final selections we worked with Sutter Hospital to make everything as clean as possible for photo’s. We arrived at 5:00 am in the morning before we had lots of staff.
You can see on the scouting shots on page 12, this was almost an impossible shot to pull off without pre production and the help of Sutter Hospital. Pretty clean and colorful without taking down all of the paperwork on the machines.
Attention to detail is a must for this kind of work. Turning on the computer and the equipment lights on the right hand side just adds so much color and depth
The same shot as above just moving to get a 3/4 view. What you do not see in the finals is all of the retouching removing the tape on the counters.
I try to keep it simple, add color where needed and accessorize the shot to make it look and feel real.
This is a very clean shots, what you do not see is all of the power cords being removed from the final image.
Basically the same shot as above but let’s move in closer for more of a visual impact
Let’s rotate the camera and shoot an approved shot on our shoot list. Lots of power cords to photoshop out of our final image.
Our final shot we need to shoot from an elevated position. This could be done from a ladder, then you have to secure the camera to the ladder, what I do is bring a heavy duty light stand on wheels easy attachments for the camera support, view finals from a ladder and shoot with a camera release so there is no movement on our final images. It’s a wrap back in the car heading to the studio.
The scouting shots went out to multiple clients to help share in the costs up front and we had three clients share in the final costs and win win for all parties.
I hope you enjoyed looking how you make something difficult easy to shoot.
Ed Asmus
Architectural People Photographer
http://www.edasmusphotography.com
Ed Asmus Photo Journal 