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Glassy Calm, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

I’ve just delivered final images to a Colorado advertising agency which recently contacted me to shoot for a real estate development campaign they are working on. This is the image that will be appearing on billboards, magazines, brochures and newspapers around central Texas some time in early 2009. I strongly suspect you will hardly recognise it in the final copy since their creative people have some exciting Photoshop plans (hence the large expanse of water in the foreground).

We had scouted the location a week before the main shoot on a grey, drizzly Saturday morning. After 6 months of drought, it was rather annoying that the weather broke on the one week I needed sunshine and it remained grey for a week. A week the following Monday, however, the weather was beautiful, the air cold and crisp and the lake deserted as we took the 30 minute run from Lakeway Marina up to the location in a rented ski boat.
The client asked for shots as low to the water as possible. The boat was a couple of feet above the water and even lying along the side and holding the camera as low as possible, I couldn’t get the best angle. Given that I had no intention of dropping my Nikon DSLRs overboard, another plan was needed and I came up with a scheme involving my Powershot G9 and a monopod to get a lens about 2 inches above the water. I attached the G9 to the monopod and tilted the head back as far as it would go. With me holding the camera strap and the client holding the monopod, we lowered it over the side of the boat and, using the 2 second self timer had just enough time to get the camera into position before the shutter fired.
While it seems ironic that the chosen image should be the one taken with the older, smaller, compact camera rather than one of the DSLRs I was also shooting with, I do really love the water in this shot. We sat around for a few minutes after getting the boat into position to let the ripples die down and it really made a difference.
I’m looking forward to January and seeing what the creatives in Denver manage to do with this one!
For comparison, here’s one of the other shots that I rather liked and which I processed “for myself.” I shot everything handheld, lying along the side of the boat and using 3 shot, 2 stop brackets to allow me to generate HDRs later.

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Lake Travis Promontory, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.