PRO COLUMN
Paul Wakefield on how he created this dreamy image for an airline campaign
Paul Wakefield discusses the process behind his beautiful campaign image
TThehis ad was one of five that I shot for an Air Mauritius campaign from France, with the copy line ‘Our Island In The Sky’.
brief was five skies at various times of the day, with the clouds formed from five indigenous species to the island – butterflies, shells, feathers, flowers and fish. I also wanted the objects to represent shapes of different types of clouds seen in Mauritian skies.
I photographed the blank skies in Mauritius on a Fuji 6X9 camera, using colour negative film for its delicate rendition with natural light. Its characteristic is more painterly than transparency film. All the objects were photographed on a Canon 1D, as there would need to be a large choice of images available at the retouching stage. I set up a makeshift studio, partly inside a hotel room and partly on the outside verandah, using a mixture of daylight and HMI daylight-balanced film lights that I hired on the island. Everything was then put together later in post-production on the computer back in London. To make that a bit easier, I photographed all the objects against different shades of blue background card, so that any reflected or absorbed light would be a close colour match to the sky they would later be set in.
I couldn’t source the species of butterflies in Mauritius, as the butterfly farm there had no adult specimens at that time, so I found a supplier in Canada who sent me 20 closed-winged adults in individual flat paper packets. I then had to re-hydrate them and re-set them in slightly different open-winged flying positions. As setting boards are flat, I had to make my own deep-cut angled boards out of hard foam. It was the most painstaking part, as the working space for my fingers was very tight compared to flat boards, and the butterflies were very delicate.
In the temporary studio in Mauritius, I pinned the re-set butterflies in a single row on a piece of blue foam and photographed them at various heights and angles in front of blue card, so that we would have a very wide range of slightly varied specimens to choose from.
We wanted their positions to be fairly similar, partly to avoid confusion with too many wing formations, but also to create a dream-like quality as though they were flying in unison, almost on the same wingbeat. Of course the really hard work came later back in London, when the retoucher had the very meticulous job of piecing all the elements together to make a cohesive, convincing image.