Photoshoots are subject to the same vagaries as any job. There are good days when everything goes well and the shots just keep coming. The light's great, the riders are enjoying themselves, the location is working out and my memory cards are filling up fast.
And then there are the bad days. The light's crap, the riders aren't motivated, the location's not working and it's hard just to get a single decent shot in the can. And on those days, it's my job to make sure that after all the swearing and frustration, the end result is nearly as good as the results from a good day.
The two-day shoot I organised earlier this week definitely fell into the 'bad day' category. In fact, I can't remember the last time so much went wrong on a single shoot. It kicked off with one of the two riders calling in sick with swine flu, although I didn't worry too much about that since Ben, the other rider, managed to find a stand-in at short notice. Who spent three hours waiting for us in the wrong carpark (with a broken mobile phone, so we couldn't reach him) before deciding we weren't going to turn up and going home.
As if that weren't bad enough, the weather consistently failed to cooperate. 'Heavy showers with sunny intervals' turned out to mean 'persistent rain with half an hour of sun at some random point during the day'. Having had the first day almost completely rained off (we were out of the door by 6am and had some shots in the can before breakfast, in anticipation of a wet day), the second day turned out to be nearly as bad. But with just half a dozen key shots ticked off my list, we couldn't afford another day spent in the car and the pub. My insistence that a carpet of sheep shit-covered grass and a roof of bracken would make a perfectly adequate shelter was starting to wear a bit thin with Ben...
Still, at least the view was good...
That is, on the rare occasions when we could actually see it...
You might think that AWOL riders and piss-poor weather would be enough in the trial-by-cock-up department. And you'd be right. But fate had another trick up its sleeve, as I discovered when one of my two flashes began intermittently refusing to fire. With indifferent light and only one functioning flash, it was looking increasingly unlikely that I was going to get the job done.
Crouched under the bracken in pouring rain and gale force winds, talking on my phone to a bemused bloke in Jessops in Leeds about flashguns and trying to work out how I could buy one and get it to the top of a windswept hill in the next couple of hours, it suddenly struck me that the situation was utterly hilarious...
And then the rain eased just enough for us to head on up the hill. The location I'd had in mind turned out to be a blinder, with an incredible ribbon of rock-strewn singletrack above a picture postcard view. The sun came out. My recalcitrant flash worked, occasionally. I shot a couple of dozen pics. A handful are really good.
Job done. One large invoice, one sick rider, one lost rider, one broken flashgun and a lot of worrying and sitting around in the rain later, we've got the single most important picture we drove a 500 mile round trip to get. And that, really is what it's all about.
Oh, the picture? You'll have to wait a few weeks to see it...
Thanks for sharing...cool pics
Posted by: Electric Pocket Bikes | October 16, 2009 at 06:37 PM