I was lucky to be asked to do a fun job by one of my favorite ad agencies last week. I'd just finished a job for a tech company from the mid western U.S. so my brain was already cogitating in the sphere of industrial pictorialism and I was hungry for more. I won't go into details about the shoot or the actual clients because I signed some NDA's. But I'll give you the big picture.....
The job was ultimately for a company that does printing and just about every type of advertising delivery and mailing you can think of, with the exception of television and web content. They own plants in several cities. They own and operate web presses (not presses for the web but giant machines that print high volume stuff with ink on paper.....) and sheet fed presses. Complex mail stuffing and sorting machines. Pre-press machines and much more. And they needed an assortment of photographs that would show how they span the chasm between good, old fashion high craft and very modern and very high tech integration of digital data.
I love shooting stuff like this and I love working for companies that produce a physical product because it's visual. Can't tell you how many software companies we've done projects for that basically have nothing visual to represent their "product" but the wrapped box the program disks come in. We shoot two basic things for those kind of companies: People meeting. People working at their computers. In the shoot I just finished we got to shoot precision gears, pulsating metal rollers, sluicing ink, platemakers, pressmen pulling huge sheets and much more. We did the IT think with people making data but the bulk of the job was real people using real mechanical machines to make real stuff.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I need to throw the woe at you first. So, when you estimate jobs like this you have a few calculations that go something like this: How much time will I spend shooting? And post processing? And meeting? And traveling? And, ultimately, what sort of usage licenses are we conveying to the client? We'd be shooting in Ft. Worth on the first day and Austin on the second day.
Ft. Worth is (on a good day) about a three hour drive from Austin so it makes a lot more sense to drive it than to wait at the airport, fight about baggage restrictions, get delayed, fly to DFW and wait for a rental car, etc. I decided to leave Austin mid afternoon on Weds., meet with my client for a preproduction pow-wow in the evening at my hotel and then, refreshed, hit the ground running on Thurs. morning early. It would be a full day and it didn't make sense to get up at 5am and drive up, shoot all day and drive back at night. Especially with an equally big and important chunk of the job continuing in Austin on Friday. Sounded good to all involved.
I had my car's oil changed and a good "once over" done by my Honda dealer the day before and they gave my car a clean bill of health. I had a ripping good lunch at Sullivan's Steakhouse with good friend and art director, Greg, dropped by Precision Camera to pick up yet another lens and then, at 2:30pm I headed north on Interstate IH-35 for my dat with destiny.
I'm tooling along with the cruise control set at 70 and Elvis Costello's, "King of America" on the music machine when, up ahead, the tire of an eighteen wheeler goes "Kaa-blam!" and sends heavy rubber shrapnel everywhere. On particular piece is guided by the mischievous photo gods right into the lower right hand side of my windshield where it leaves a nasty scar of a crack. Why do tires explode? Not sure but I think some it has to do with high temperatures and that afternoon it was up around 100 degrees in the shade. The car thermometer was telling me that the roadway temp was around 121 (f).
The sudden smack against the windshield sure woke me up. I weighed the risks and my relative position and decided that the windshield was virtuous and would hold for the next few days. My heart stopped racing and I pressed north. Then the next shoe dropped. I was 45 minutes out of Ft. Worth proper when the air in the car started to feel warm and clammy and then warmer and clammier. I turned off the air conditioning and attempted to restart it which causes a grinding noise and made the car shudder. The air conditioning gave up the ghost and joined all the other appliances that have let me down in a circle of hell where they no doubt wait for me to arrive. Ready to put me to work......
Windows open, I press on into the maelstrom called Ft. Worth rush hour. True to form, trouble comes in threes. I was making good time in the heart of the city, looking for loop 820 when everything ground to a halt. A truck driver flipped his rig. All traffic was blocked for the better part of an hour. Which is generally just annoying when your AC works and you've got a handful of good CD's or something ripe and saucy on the iPod. But with no water in the car and the temperatures on the asphalt in the Mojave Desert range I was getting a bit nervous.
I stumbled into the Courtyard by Marriott, handed over my credit card and begged for water. I'd made it. But what do you do when your schedule is tight and compacted over the course of three days and your horse is crippled? My response was to suck it up, get the job done, get back to Austin, get the job done and then see to the car this coming monday. It was a miserable drive back home. It got hotter and hotter and the crack on the windshield got bigger and bigger. But the bottom line is that I'm quite capable of spending time in the heat. It was a matter of comfort and not safety.
But the responses I got from other photographers ranged from all over the place. One suggested that I should have hired an assistant to pick up my car at the client's facility and spend the day shepherding it through the local dealer. But there's never the guarantee that you'll get the car back on your schedule. Every corporate person I talked to suggested, cavalierly, that I get a car service to pick me up, take me to the airport and that there simply must be a service that deals in stranded cars for busy execs. (I don't fall into that category). Several wealthy doctor friends suggested that I should have just called my bank and whatever car dealer I favored and bought a new car and had it delivered to the workplace in time for the drive home. No muss, no fuss. One worn and battered old assistant suggested riding the Greyhound Bus but I'm not that cheap yet....
I guess it would be fun to hear what you guys would have done........
The job went off without a hitch and the client couldn't have been more gracious. We shot 1500 frames in two days and I've already edited the take down to around 800. In addition to the facilities and machines we also photographed their senior executives. Everyone was so down to earth. Another reminder that, perhaps, companies that make real things are a bit more grounded and nicely process driven......
It was a fun, old fashioned (pre-recession) style shoot. Lots of moving around. Lots of images and permutations of images. Grizzled crafts people. Bright technicians. Lots of "show off" photo opportunities. Given a choice I'll take industrial assignments every day of the week over just about everything else out there.
Your car, like your camera and your lights, is part of your kit. I guess I need to start making contingency plans for transportation just the way I have back ups for everything else..........one more thing to worry about....
Best, Kirk
