An afternoon with a decidedly inappropriate camera and lens for street photography. Too big. Too heavy. But I got to watch a big production, car photo shoot...

A large scale photo session for a Chevy SUV.

I'd never seen a bigger crane arm attached to an automobile before. 

Fascinating.

I was feeling a bit glum most of last week but usually a nice long walk with a camera helps to clear my head and adjust my attitude. After my swim today I feel chipper and optimistic. Funny how that all works. But yesterday, with my head in the fog I selected the least appropriate lens and camera body to drag along through the streets of my home town. It was the Panasonic S1H and the 50mm f1.4 Lumix S-Pro. If ever you feel untethered from gravity this combination will hold you down tight to the firmament. 

Don't get me wrong; the S1H is a wonderful production camera and, I think, the state of the art for video cameras designed for professional quality/state of the art video in small crew,  commercial environment. I absolutely love working with this camera when I have it snugged onto a good tripod and plugged into a range of supporting peripherals. I find the 50mm f1.4 lens to be the sharpest lens with the cleanest and most transparent output of any lens I have ever used - even across all formats. 

But carrying the combination around, over one's shoulder, with a shoulder strap, is an exercise in masochism. And this opinion is coming from a photographer who used to carry around a Hasselblad with a medium format Zeiss lens on it through the streets of many cities for hours and days at a time. The S1H + 50mm S-Pro just isn't at all comfortable for easy and casual photo walks. I'll take it along on days when I have a mission in mind and need its special attributes, and I'll take in on just about any kind of commercial job I can imagine, but as a fun camera for leisure walking and snapping? Ahhhh. NO. 

Before I move on to the story about car shooting I will say that of all three of the S1x model cameras I think the S1H has the best out of camera color and tonality in the files. Even the Jpegs are crisper and richer. I can only conjecture that this camera has faster processing, or more nodes for parallel processing, and so is engineered to apply more complex corrections to each file as they fly through the camera's processing pipeline. I'm sure Panasonic would demure from confirming this because of the torrent of feedback they would no doubt get from S1 and S1R owners but I own all three models and find a small but notable difference between the S1H and its siblings. No data to back this up but that has never stopped us before. 

Car Shoot. I don't often work in big teams and I have never, ever had to do a high end shoot where the car was the star, but I'm always amazed when I see an "old school" photography production in full bloom in this day and age. I ran into just such a shoot around sunset on the "Butterfly" bridge that connects downtown proper to the area around the library. I've posted countless images of the curved, yellow spans here on the blog so I'm sure you'll remember it. 

I knew I was heading into a big time photo zone when I came to the intersection just to the east of the bridge and found it blocked off. I knew it was a legit project because there was an off duty police officer manning the blocked street and a set of orange cones set to restrict access. Pedestrians, however, were unconstrained. 

On the outsides of the curved spans are sidewalks while the two lane road runs between the spans. The sidewalk with the sunset in the background was blocked both for this shoot and because of some adjacent building construction but the north side walk was accessible.  

As I crossed the bridge I saw ten or twelve people clustered around a Chevrolet SUV and was immediately struck by the insanely long crane arm that was anchored to the right side of the vehicle and extended across the front and about eight to ten feet past the left side of the truck-ette. It was a large, square arm made, I'm sure, of lightweight aluminum and as you can see in the photo just above it has a right angle connection to the car over on the far side. At that junction point a technician can raise or lower the angle of the arm to give the camera at the far end of the arm the ability to shoot at a low angle or a high angle --- or any angle in between. The crane arm is also assembled in spans so the crew can make the main arm longer or shorter. 

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There were a couple of guys whose job it seemed to be to fluff the actual product. Between takes they'd get to the car and dust it or shine the edges or clean some part. When they were done they'd hand the set back over to the art director and photography crew. I presume at some point they took photos with a model as driver in the car but he was leaving as I arrived on the scene and now the photographer and crew where intent on making images of the car in the foreground and the sun, already over the horizon, supplying a nice, crispy, golden hour sky glow. 

With a Phase One medium format camera mounted on the business end of the crane arm the photography team would have a crew driver drive along the expanse of the bridge very slowly while they used a tethered laptop to monitor the camera's view and trigger the shutter at what they deemed to be appropriate times. 

This would be much, much faster than moving the camera on a tripod and continually resetting. A good strategy also because once the camera was focused on the car there was no chance of changing the subject to camera distance during the shoot.

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checking the composition and position of the car to the glowing horizon. 

Also setting focus. 

So, how much crew does it take to photograph a car? Seemingly, a bunch. You had a police officer at each end of the street. As you can see above you had three people hovering around the camera at all times. I presume one (plaid shirt) was the camera assistant and to his right was the actual photographer. To his left, in the puffy down jacket, was the art director. At a station not shown were three other people looking at a 27 inch monitor that was set up on a movable cart and mostly enclosed with black flags to block glare from the screen. Three or four crew members were positioned on each side of the actual shoot. Some keeping dirt off the road, some guarding unused gear and others standing by to either disassemble the crane arm or move equipment to another location. I think I counted fourteen crew, clients and photography staff --- not counting the police officers. 

In the twenty or so minutes I was there they were still working on the same angle I saw when I got there. I heard the phrase, "Back to One." over and over again. The crew had, within their blocked zone, five other vehicles including a grip truck and vehicles rigged to shoot from car to car. A passerby asked if they were shooting a TV commercial and they told her that it was "just" photography for catalogs and brochures. So, fourteen people to get still photos. I can only imagine how big an army they would have had to assemble for an actual television commercial shoot...

To their credit it was a pretty well conceived shot and there was no bluster or posturing. They'd obviously done this kind of work so often that they were efficient and any giddiness or uncertainty had long been expunged from their process. I gleaned from all their license plates that the crew originated in Michigan so I presume their biggest (or only) clients are the automotive industry. 

It was nice to see people still working with an old school mentality of getting everything just right. It reminded me that when we cut corners here to meet someone's fictitious budgets we're doing the whole industry a disservice by making the final products of our labors just a little poorer, just a little bit compromised. 

When I saw the camera they were using I laughed to myself at all the people on the camera forums who argue about whether or not a Sony, Nikon or Canon is the "real" camera for professionals. I guess for mom and pop photo businesses the range of consumer cameras is just fine but this is a reminder that when the budgets swell and the markets are bigger there are still professionals reaching for 100 megapixel medium format cameras, and the rigging tools used to squeeze the best effects out of them. Nice. 

car backing up and crew walking along viewing and shooting.

One person to handle cables, one to work on the laptop and 

one to supervise and look over shoulders at the final results.

note the viewing station on the far left hand side of the frame. 

It was good to see the entire crew masked at all times. Even when standing twenty or thirty feet from each other. Working pros working professionally. 

And that's something I saw on my walk yesterday. It was fun to see. 

 ( This blog post inspired by Dr. Suess's: "To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street").