Super Fence

This morning, bright and early, like 4am bright and early, I drove up to Tacoma for a commercial shoot for a security fence company based in Minnesota. I wanted to arrive on location at sunrise so I could have good light....anyway, this company is making a new fence that somehow senses when the fence is touched and sends a signal back to the guard shack. Pretty cool stuff. The prototype fence, about 100 feet of it, is installed at the Port of Tacoma dock. My job today was to take cool photos of the fence so that they can use them in ads and brochures to sell the thing....I knew this shoot was going to be a challenge because the fence was in a spot with nothing but ugliness around it. Blackberry bushes on one side and a freeway on the other. Yuck. Here is what the scene looks like in real life. That's my assistant Amaren carrying a light back from behind the fence.

Ugly huh? I thought so too. Not to mention not much room to move around behind the thing. It was a challenge to show the details of the fence, yet not show a lot of crap and have it look cool. The sunrise was great this morning, but because of the freeway overpass and the location of the fence it was not possible to shoot into it as much as I would have liked. I wanted a "feel" to the photo and I'd been wanting to try screwing around with White Blance for a while, so I set the camera to 2800 Kelvin, as cool as it would go to give the sky a nice blue and to give the fence to cooler tone to it....I also underexposed the sky by a few stops to make it nice and dark.

I think they turned out pretty well and the client was happy. I liek the photo at the top the best because you can see a bit of the fence lenght and the photo has nice lines. I with that overpass was not there, but it works to darken the background so the fence wires pop out little more.