Industrial photography usually means stepping out of the studio and into an unknown environment to photograph your client’s products. In this case it was a commercial bus washing facility. Our client, Atemo, had given us the brief to make the images impactful and “different”. We had a plan. We knew that we could create that WOW effect.
Industrial lighting
We decided to shoot at night and use coloured lighting to create massive impact. Shooting in a large industrial unit we used our most powerful studio lights. In fact we used 4 lights, two lighting the front of the scene and two creating the coloured backlighting. This helped bring out the spraying of the water.
The buses were coming through the wash every ten minutes or so. This meant that we had to move the camera each time a new bus came through as we were shooting from the middle of the “road”.
We needed to capture the front, side and rear of the washing facility so we spent quite a lot of time shooting, testing and experimenting with coloured gels on the lights and angles. Below is the rear shot – again move the slider to see how we achieved this.
Retouching
As can be seen from the above images, it is very important in industrial photography to be able to understand how to use lighting to create high drama and impactful images. It is also crucial to be able to use highly technical retouching skills to enhance specific aspects of a product. It is also important to remove all the unnecessary distractions that one always finds in industrial scenes. In this case we were able to take the relatively neutral curtains from one side and carefully blend them in to the other side to hide the “mess”.
Happy client
In all we took around 500 images on the night. We reduced this down to around 60, which we presented to our client using our on-line gallery. The client chose 10 images, as we had previously agreed. We then completed the retouching – on average this takes about one to two hours per image when they are quite technical, as these were.
We presented these to the client in both a high resolution version for printing and a lower resolution set for use on social media. The client had high expectations from this shoot and we were very happy to have satisfied that expectation.
A really interesting project to have worked on.
