2008 Manhattan Beach Wiine Auction Poster

Question

http://www.peterfigen.com/ocs/wine_auction_elements/
Here's a link to a quick web gallery that starts off with the finished poster and ends up with the comp, complete with rip that was what I had to go by.
When you get a comp from an agency, you generally go through it from back to front and front to back to consider all the elements that you might need. In this case the I pretty much knew that the main shot had to be from a helicopter. I was more concerned about the birds.
After looking at about 60 stock shots of seagulls I knew that this wasn't going to be easy. The choices were to shoot my own at the beach, hire an animal trainer or go to a taxidermist. Budget pretty much determined my direction. There were two stuffed gulls in all of L.A. and both were pretty ratty. The animal trainers wanted about $3500 to bring live birds in the studio. Ouch! So my girlfriend, Gee, and I headed to Sunset Blvd and PCH and the beach behind Gladstones Restaurent with seven loaves of cheap white bread and in about an hour, I shot 700+ images of gulls, mostly looking down from above, but from every possible angle. It really felt like we were in the middle of the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz, and we didn't get crapped on! It was only after I shot the seagulls and saw that what I had might actually work that I worked up an estimate for the job. It's not the way I usually work, but in this case it made the most sense, and now I have a great collection of gull images - for the next time...
Helicopter. My first ride but definitely not my last. We - the two pilots and my good friend and photographer Benny Chan, flew from Long Beach over to Manhattan Beach in about 12 minutes at an altitude of 400-500 feet. Would have been faster but the Robinson 44 is limited to 100 knots when you take the doors off. Contrary to popular belief, while the 'copter can hold sort of still, it does keep on moving so we made about a dozen circular passes. I wanted to veer away from the comp as shooting straight down would have meant almost no reflection off the water and less depth to the overal image. There is a ton of vibration and even shooting at 1/2000th-1/3000th with IS enabled, not every shot is crisp. The pilots were very co-operative and we were able to go as low as 300 ft. which is the approximate altitude of the final shot. The best part of the helicopter ride was the takeoff and landing. Just floating up and down was an amazing feeling - like the 3-D highways in Back to the Future must have felt. I was warned about airsickness, but even leaning into a banked turn with no door did not bother me at all.
I had to remember to shoot surfers for later, as we almost always have a surfer in the poster.
Back in the studio it was really a matter of deciding which out of the 700 bird shots and which of the 350 pier shots would all fit together. There was a lot of trying out this vs that, changing size relationships until it all sort of gelled together. I also decided to take all the people off the beach and re-populate the pier with individual from alternate frames. Just till it felt right to me. The Photoshop work was pretty straightforward masking but the composite image was taken into Lab color where it was tweaked for color contrast and saturation. After bringing it back to RGB, I added a Color Fill Layer set to multiply with a yellowish color that gives the late afternoon wash to the image. You can see the difference between the somewhat boring original and the final.
Peter
I

Answer 1

People not involved in advertising are always shocked at how much good imaging costs. The photographer's experience, technical expertise, expenses, overhead and finally image usage, all combine to determine the final price - oh, and the client's budget too.
I've started charging the wine auction folks more or less regular rates. When I first did this ten years ago, the auction was taking in about $20K. Now it's 25 times that and they can well afford to pay something for their image.
While this project is really small potatoes in the advertising world, when you are working on a project where the client is going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and going to get national exposure in front of millions of sets of eyes, the relative worth of the image does go up. There's a lot more riding on an entire campaign that just the photography, so the photography has to be done right and done well, and that generally means more money.