The masters challenge - Photovacation 2014

The masters challenge, Photovacation 2014 Authors: Nikolay Abadjiev, Plamena Koeva

In August 2014 the organisers of Photovacation invited us to participate in the initiative “The masters challenge”. The main idea of this challenge was to show the audience the process of realization of a photography project from the perspective of two professional photography teams – Resize Studio and Temelko Temelkov. Our task included generating the idea and its implementation within the budget of 500 lv, provided by our sponsors Dynaphos and Canon Bulgaria.
Without adversarial, the challenge aimed to illustrate the individual approach of each team. 

So, here’s what we did with our task.
The budget of 500 lv has offered us the opportunity to use two different approaches. The first was to use a standard approach and to spend the whole budget for stylist and makeup artist. The second was to forfeit services of people outside and to invest all our sources in buying decors and accessories for the shooting.
The first approach would be much closer to the original way we proceed with our clients, but considering the idea, which we had and our desire to make the things more interesting for the audience we decided to choose the second one.

 1. The idea
 When we were selecting the idea to realize, our thoughts was understandably revolved around the marine themes. Our main concern was that even the topic has been extremely popular, the visual clichés  which contained were too many: waves, horizontals, boats, fishermen, sails, ships . . . and every possible combination between them was repeatedly exploited.
We found the solution in the escape of reality. We came to the idea of a fantasy world, in which the entire surface of the planet has been covered with water and its citizens have found a refuge from the huge tidal waves in a small, flying isles. Along with this it came the idea for our main character – a fisherman, who uses the numerous ladders hanging out from the islands to descent to the ocean. Even at this stage we considered that only one photo wouldn’t be enough to tell our story as we would like . . . but for this – later. 

After the concept has been discussed, we made some rough sketches of the first shot, like a composition and the main character – as most common ideas for the styling. 

As the next step in the process, we started collecting so-called “mood-board” – a collection of images, that provides us guidelines for selecting adequate accessories, for the styling and for the model’s look – everything that would help to concretised the final appearance of the project. 

Being fans of the post-apocalyptic genre in the cinema, our ideas for the styling of the leading character have taken us to the depths of prodavalnik.com, and soon numerous parcels began to arrive. 

 2. The preparation
  It was clear, that big part of the preparation of the costume and the accessories for the shot should be accomplished in Sofia, before we left for Photovacation. There, we would have neither the time, nor the conditions to prepare ourselves adequate. Once the whole budget was spent, our house woke up in a bamboo forest, tens of meter of ropes, fabrics, leather . . . and a collection of antique articles with strange purposes – corsets, scissors for sheep shearing, belts for high activities and many others. 

After we turned our home into a store – came the more difficult part, transforming all these “raw” materials into meaningful decorations and accessories. An essential element in our shot would be the ladder – good looking, but also strong enough not to risk to injure the model. We looked for references again.

Then we got to the realization. The bamboo and the ropes gradually turned into a ladder, the scissors for sheep shearing – in arrowhead, the leather and the fabrics – in a costume. 

 3. The shooting
  Given that our idea was including very complicated post-processing of a different images, right after we arrived in Primorsko, we started “collecting” separate components, as we paid most attention to these ones which were needed for creating the “flying” isles. Around 20 shots, captured in Sozopol and its areas, were needed for building the two islands. 

Our leading character we captured at sunset, near the Primorsko Beach. We took advantage of the existing metal construction on the beach and the precious help of the viewers, to keep her in the right position. 

Author: Vili Todorova

For our great disappointment the sky in the moment of shooting wasn’t expressive enough. For our luck though the next evening we managed to photograph magnificent sky at the same location and at the same time, which gave us the opportunity to replace the sky in the original image in a plausible way. 

Along with the shooting of the first image, the idea of the second photo has framed in our heads, the one, in which we wanted to develop the story. We've decided to use a reference to “the stick fishermen” of Sri Lanka, catching fish on poles stuck in the flood zone. 

As shooting the model in the water wasn’t a realistic task, considering the risks, we’ve decided to capture the image on the beach.

    model: Ani Rangelova

We’ve captured the other components of the image separately – a background, a lantern, poles . . . We used portable flashlights ThinkLite TT520 to light the components while shooting, as everything was happening after sundown. 
     

 4. The post process
Although the post-process is the most complicated and time consuming part of the process, it’s difficult to describe it with words. We will only say that long before we have finished, we lost the number of layers in Photoshop. 

Several dozens of hours retouching later the two images were ready:

In many ways "The master challenge”  has turned out way more challenging then we'd expected in the beginning, but we hope that the outcome will please the viewer as much as us.