Painter
Den Hoorn
Texel
The Netherlands
Painter for Pro Gold painting materials
Pro gold is a company that manufactures everything a professional painter needs: brushes, sand paper, gloves … everything. You get the idea. For this advertisement, we wanted to express pushing oneself beyond ordinary limits to get the best results possible.
The concept: a man abseiled, hanging from a building tower, painting the wooden exterior moldings of a church.
We had very specific requirements for the shoot. The building, for instance, had to have wood somewhere on the tower that needed to be painted, and we also needed a balcony on the building to set up the necessary equipment for the shoot. After a thorough search we found a church on the Dutch island of Texel, a perfect building set in a fantastic location–all without distractions cluttering the background.
Camera swinging outside church bell tower
We planned the shoot on a beautiful day in September. We envisioned an image of the hanging painter backlit by the morning sun. We wanted to capture this idea without the help of computer trickery. There was only a short period we had in which to take the shot, somewhere between five to fifteen minutes, where the contrast wasn’t too high to avoided white clipping and underexposed blacks.
We set up our gear the day before, including the ropes, the camera, and the remote controls and did some testing. That way we knew exactly what to do the next morning. On the day of the shoot there was an extremely dense fog. We went up the tower around 5:30 but the sun was not powerful enough to burn away the heavy mist. Luckily, we were able to do several shots of the upcoming sun as well as the painter, using different exposure values. That way, we were able to composite the shot in the computer. Not ideal, but the result was perfect.
My assistant and the churchwarden preparing the shoot.