Exesight Road Trip

We were recently commissioned to undertake a major photographic project for a large drinks manufacturer, which involved travelling to Bristol, Cheltenham and Torquay to capture a range of different images.

The brief was to capture artistic, creative images from each of these locations. One slightly unusual aspect was that two of the images were going to be printed onto a folding wall over seven metres long! Printing a single image seven metres across will result in terrible image quality, so we had to employ some trickery to get these difficult shots, which I'll discuss later.

So, myself, Natasha and Chris loaded all of our gear into the car and went off on the first leg of our trip - Bristol and Cheltenham (with Torquay scheduled for another day).

After a lengthy drive, we arrived at Cheltenham. Unfortunately the weather wasn't really playing ball, but we did get some photos of the promenade and the Imperial Gardens. We will need to return to Cheltenham in the next week to get some more photos in better weather!

We had better luck in Bristol, when the sun came out. We began on the famous Bristol Downs. This area is difficult to photograph in some respects - it's a plain, grassy area with trees and park benches as the only notable points of interest. To this end, we tried a variety of styles - some straight-forward landscape photos, and some more general shots, as well as some abstract efforts.

Chris and Natasha posed in some to add visual interest to the scene, as you can see from this image.

Unfortunately, working with idiots does mean that not every shot will come out as intended!

At lunch we stopped at http://www.pizzaprovencale.co.uk/, which was excellent!

As the light began to draw in, we visited the Clifton Suspension Bridge. We were a bit concerned by the fact that one end had been covered in scaffolding, so we tried to find angles where this was concealed, or at least less obvious.

We ended up heading home at around 11pm - a very long day, but quite successful, in Bristol at least!

Torquay was a very different challenge. Myself and Natasha went there one weekday morning, only to find that it had fogged over by the time we arrived. The atmosphere was so dense that we stood no chance of getting the wide, landscape photo of the area that our customer had requested, so we went back the next week.

Fortunately, our next visit was much better, with ideal weather and a very clear view over Torquay. One of our favourite photos is shown below - note that the original is seven meters wide!

The image was created by taking many photos (over 90 individual images) using a telephoto lens (the Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8). Each photo contains only a small part of the overall image. These are then stitched together in software to create one gigantic photograph, suitable for printing at the required sizes. A good deal of manual work is then required to ensure that the image is free from any obvious joins or other problems. The image below illustrates just how much detail was captured in a tiny part of the image.

Once the job was complete, we submitted proofs to our customer so that the required images could be chosen. Only a large Cheltenham landscape image remains to be provided.

We've had quite a few commercial enquiries lately, as the economy slowly begins to pick up - we hope for plenty more that allow us to be creative like this one!

Paul