It's All in the Details
BY DIANE SMYTH
"I'm a big fan of Olaf Veltman's work and when the Stella campaign came up I just thought it was right for him," says Gary Wallis, creative services director at Lowe. "It was all about the detail and size--all about the enormity. He still shoots on a 8 X 10 and that really comes across in the quality of his landscapes." The "Stella Wallis" is referring to is not a woman, but a high premium European lager and its accompanying dark, brooding ad campaign that evokes sacrifices to the devil and industrial landscapes.
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"I find it hard to discuss my own work, I just like to do it," says Dutchman Veltman, with characteristic modesty. "But many people say it's painterly."
In fact Veltman, who has shot campaigns for global brands BMW, Mercedes-Benz, LLBean, North Carolina Tourist Board as well as Stella, has earned the 'painterly' tag for two reasons: first, the incredible detail of his images and second, their muted color palette.
Veltman says he admires Ralph Gibson and Josef Sudek, "They inspired me when I started studying in the 1980s and they are still my heroes now," he says. "I enjoy shooting black-and-white as much as color, it's just that color is far more in demand." Veltman also admires Richard Misrach for his color work.
Veltman describes his tonal range as "limited," and achieves the look through careful post-production. He has worked with London-based outfit Saddington & Baynes for about eight years, working closely alongside retoucher Chris Christodoulou. "Olaf doesn't just de-saturate the whole picture, he works on some elements more than others," says Christodoulou. "His color palette is different to everyone else's."
But it was Veltman's intense attention to detail that won him the recent Stella Artois campaign, via advertising agency Lowe Worldwide. Wallis commissioned the shoot, having followed Veltman's dark vision for the last three years.
Alastair Ross, Lowe's art director, and his team came up with the campaign concept--"sacrifice to the devil." But having given Veltman this brief, the agency left him free to develop the idea with Ross. "Stella trusted the agency, and the agency trusted me," says Veltman. "Every job should be like that."
He researched every conceivable sign of the devil, from horse's hooves to black thumbnails--some of which can be seen in the final ads--and he also went along to the model casting. "We had a huge casting in the States but when we found the guy it was obvious," says Veltman. "Everyone who saw him said 'He's the one.'"
Veltman had to provide three final images, which had to be produced in just over a month. He describes this timetable as "a bit of a killer," especially given the amount of post-production required on the office image. The shoot itself took 10 days.
"I shoot as much as possible in-camera," he says. "I want to use the camera as a tool rather than do everything in post-production. But it was impossible to find an office that had the right background scene, so we shot the interior and background separately then joined the images."
Veltman develops a clear idea of what he wants to create before shooting, and in this case finding a background landscape that matched his imagination proved difficult. "At first I thought we could go to a steel factory, but when we looked at them I realized that they were far too clean," he says. "I wanted something really nasty and atmospheric.
"So I sent my producer, Loni Weholt, off to scout for locations with reference materials ripped out from magazines, and eventually she found an abandoned oil refinery in L.A."
The fact that the site was abandoned was a real bonus, allowing Veltman to hire a team of pyrotechnics and shoot real smoke and flames rather than adding them in post-production. "In a working refinery you can't even smoke a cigarette," he laughs. "They were starting fires and setting off explosions."
And where retouching was unavoidable, he made it look as realistic as possible through careful preparation, discussing each element of the final image with Saddington & Baynes before shooting. "I wanted the final image to look as natural as possible," he says. "If there has been lots of work, I don't want it to show."
For example, he shot the reflections on the windows so that they could be superimposed on the view, and shot the oil refinery from a raised position to give the impression of an above-ground level view. For Christodoulou, this attention to detail puts Veltman in the top five commercial photographers.
"All the elements have to be photographed in exactly the right way in order for us to put the elements together seamlessly," adds Christodoulou. "Everything has to be shot from the right angles, with the right light and in a systematic way. Only about three or four photographers are spot on at giving us what we need, but Olaf is one of the best. The Stella campaign couldn't have been shot better."
Finnish-born. Los Angeles-based photographer Markku Lahdesmaki likes to tell a good story: a bit surreal, a tad humorous, completely compelling. He tells his stories not through words but through advertising photography.
In his ad for Pioneer USA, for example, a man flees his sunken car--presumably the result of an accident--and swims to safety, car speakers tucked securely under his arm.
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In other images, a matador interrupts a bullfight to accept a package in the center of the ring; the bull circles impatiently. Two guys drinking beer fail to notice their trailer slipping backward into a lake. A shopper stumbles upon an elephant in a mall parking garage. (These are ads that Lahdesmaki shot for Finland Post Office, Koff beer and a Finish telecommunications company, respectively.)
His stories unfold, but they don't necessarily conclude. As I looked at Lahdesmaki's portfolio, my three year old sat on my lap and doggedly asked of each image, "What happens next?" He wanted simply to flip a page and discover how every one of these anecdotes was resolved.
How does Lahdesmaki do it?
"Markku has something no other photographer has when it comes to working with light," says art director David Muller of Goodby Silverstein Partners. "Markku's photos always have a kind of warm look that's unique to him."
Muller worked with Lahdesmaki on an ad for Rain-X while he was still at Chiat Day. "We had a funky concept" for the ad, Muller recalls. "A car hanging from a clothes line. We wanted it to look surreal."
Muller's designs seemed a natural fit for Lahdesmaki's style, but the photographer managed to take Muller's beyond anything he had imagined.
"Markku brought magic to it with the lighting and things I could have never seen," says Muller. "He ended up having a similar vision to what I wanted the final product to look like--but it was more dynamic than I could ever have hoped."
Today, Lahdesmaki's crisply detailed yet subtly surreal vignettes, dramatic lighting and brooding skies attract clients like Apple, Microsoft, Nike and Adidas. But his distinctively unnerving style took a long time to develop, he says, the result of "years of shooting and shooting and seeing what I like and continuing in that style." He describes his work as "European," with a subtlety that seems natural to his home country. "People always admire my colors and they like the simplicity of my photographs, which I guess comes from my Scandinavian heritage," he says. He adds, "The greatest source of inspiration is the vast forests and endless lakes of Finland where I grew up."
About 15 years ago Lahdesmaki and his wife Anne left Finland and moved to London. After three years they returned to Finland only to leave shortly thereafter. "We left for new challenges and ended up in L.A.," says Lahdesmaki. Anne now works as Lahdesmaki's studio manager and personal art director.
About 40 percent of Lahdesmaki's work comes out of Finland, the rest from the U.S. "It's a good balance," he says. "Here it's bigger crews and approvals take longer. In Finland it's easier to have a creative solution approved."
On the set, Lahdesmaki says, "I am always very, very focused yet I always let myself enjoy the process. I like to plan ahead of time so the day of the shoot goes smoothly, but the final image can still be the result of a spontaneous idea that unfolds while shooting."
After the shoot, he prefers to work with the retouchers he relies on regularly, Rocket Studio in Los Angeles. He does some of the retouching himself, then gives the Rocket Studio artists a rough comp. "The retoucher doesn't need to start from scratch," he explains. "He already has a layered, rough image from me. I show him what I want. The retoucher does his art, and then we finish it together."
"He's so laid back about his style of shooting," says art director Joe Baran of Cramer-Krasselt/Chicago. "He knows exactly how in the end he'll put it all together."
Baran worked with Lahdesmaki on an ad for A.T. Kearney, a management consultancy. "The idea was to show offices in disarray--visual examples of what would happen if you didn't hire the right consultant," Baran explains. There were a total of six ads, including an image of employees struggling to work during an office windstorm and another of an office filling with water. Baran says Lahdesmaki got the job, in part, because he had an underwater scene in his portfolio. "His book demonstrated his ability to put together all these elements we thought were necessary to pull this assignment off."
The underwater scene was shot in several stages: Lahdesmaki shot first through warped glass and later shot people underwater in a pool. "Lahdesmaki does little things to bring a shoot to life," Baran notes. "He got a producer to run out and get warped glass and old bottles so he could create the illusion of water. He was really inventive on the set."
Like Muller, Baran says the finished ads exceeded his expectations. "It was amazing at the end when we looked back at our sketches how similar, but better, the ads were," Baran recalls. "The results were much cleaner and so well put together--seamless and so believable."
Cramer-Krasselt has its own retouching studio in house, but Baran and his team left the retouching to Lahdesmaki and his team of collaborators.
"When you look at a book like Markku's, you really need the retouching to go through the photographer," says Baran. "You want Markku involved and you want to use his people. It's a huge part of his work."
The Gentle Touch
BY REUEL GOLDEN
"Andric is great at making pieces fit together seamlessly," says Michelle Litos, art director at Cramer-Krasselt. "The retouching doesn't draw attention to itself. It's subtle." Litos collaborated with Andric on a campaign for Corona.
"What I like about Andric's work is that it looks like it's been done in-camera," says Rich Wakefield, creative director at West Wayne, who hired Andric for a LandAmerica ad. "It's really subtle."
You get the message: The Toronto-based advertising photographer Andric (he goes by one name) comes from the school of understated post-production photography. His work is the very antithesis of the over-elaborate, busy, absurdist style in advertising photography. It is precise location and landscape imagery that appears real, but always with a slight twist.
Andric has lived in Toronto since 2002, shooting for such clients as IBM, Amex, Honda, Guinness, Corona and IBM, among others. One of his more memorable assignments was working with Wakefield of West Wayne, the Atlanta-based shop, on a three-print campaign for LandAmerica, a client who specializes in insurance coverage for new homeowners. The campaign's concept was based on depicting paper houses and then placing them into cityscapes. The paper house was a way of illustrating that all one's insurance needs are covered by just one piece of paper. The shoot required Andric to first photograph the houses and then a large piece of paper, 8X11 feet. He then merged the elements in post-production. The final ads show a typical street scene with the paper house seamlessly blended into the background.
Andric, 39, is part of a generation of photographers who grew up using bulky cameras, but he is equally adept with the intricacies of Photoshop. The LandAmerica campaign was a merging of the two worlds.
First the old world: "I shoot most of my stuff in 4 X 5. It gives me so much more control over the perspective and also I really have to think about the images before I get to the camera and not through the camera," says Andric. "It imposes a different method of working."
The campaign was shot on location in Toronto. Because of the shadows, Andric photographed the foreground and the background at different times of the day. The focus of the ad is the paper house; the original plan was to shoot the paper in a studio. Andric had other ideas. "Right from the start he was thinking all the time about how this would look. A lot of photographers just go for the easiest option," says Wakefield. "He said the paper had to be shot outdoors next to the houses. Because of the subtleties in the shadows the light had to be identical."
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This became a literally hands-on production with Wakefield and a colleague holding up the folded piece of paper. He photographed the shadows hitting the trees, conscious that they would later appear as the same shadows on the door being opened in the paper house. The camera was set in the same place and Andric used the landscape as a base from which he could add or subtract details in post-production.
Not only does Andric strive to shoot everything in 4 X 5, usually with a single 110mm wide-angle lens, but he also does all his own retouching in Photoshop. He might get an assistant to make the masks and to do some cosmetic retouching, but when it comes to the actual compositing, he does it all himself. "Art directors know that they will be dealing with the same person after we've done shooting, it means that I am being paid [at a day rate around $8000 a day] for my complete vision," the photographer says. "We can discuss the feel of the photos during the shoot and that we can experiment and evolve. It is a great opportunity to rework images and a lot of fun and not enough photographers take advantage of that."
Andric particularly enjoys choosing a sky for the final ad. He has hundreds of them on file, all shot by him over the years and he says that the sky and the color treatment are paramount in getting the atmosphere and emotion of the image just right. For the LandAmerica ad, the overall concept required a more a muted and somewhat neutral look, sky and all.
The more recent Corona beer ad from the Chicago-based agency Cramer-Krasselt had a very different look, but Andric's method was the same. "Corona has this beach iconography," explains art director Litos. "White sand, turquoise water and palm trees, all bright and glowing and in this landscape, we make the product the hero."
Andric shot the ads on location in Mexico, again on 4 X 5. His brief was to combine the beauty of the landscape in natural light with the product and keep it looking real. "Andric is just a great landscape photographer," says Litos. "He is always striving to get something better. His mind is always working very fast and he is very good at crafting what shot will work in post-production."
The photograph of the lime wedged into the bottle is a composite of. Andric photographed the empty bottle, a bottle with beer, an empty bottle with a lime in it and a different sky from his archive. "We thought about gluing the lime to the bottle, says Litos, "but it wouldn't have looked right." It also would have meant depriving Andric "the fun"--his word--of subtly, always subtly, perfecting the look and feel of the composition in post-production.
"The only thing about Andric is that I do worry about when he gets to sleep," says a concerned Wakefield. "We would shoot all day and by the following morning he would have already more or less turned the photo around."
There's no rest for the wizard.