BTS Sunday: Bruno Barbey in South Africa
Magnum Photographer Bruno Barbey in South Africa, 2014
OK, so, we’re in Cape Town, South Africa. It’s February 2014 – winter in the United States, summer in South Africa.
I’m there with a team from the New York offices of BBDO, a South African production team from Steel Productions and Magnum photographer Bruno Barbey and his wife Caroline.
We had only been in South Africa for a day, so the first full day there was a scouting day. We were scouting a number of different locations. The setting for these shots would be “Young People Being Active, Showing Fitness” for the lifestyle section of our corporate image gallery.
The day was gorgeous! Brilliant sun, warm. Like I said, we were going to a number of locations. I think by the time we got to Silvermine Nature Reserve, it was after lunch. We expected to shoot there in the early morning, and would have best to have scouted it then, but this would work. Gave us a good idea of what we could look for.
Cool. Neat. This’ll be perfect, especially with the early morning light.
Wow it’s warm.
Where’s the cold water?
Just some of the thoughts I remember hearing the day of the scout.
And so, the next morning, we all got up around 3:30 a.m. to grab some coffee and head to the spot.
THIS is what we were faced with:
Yep, fog.
Not just a little..A LOT of fog.
And it was chilly. Almost downright cold. Everyone was in t-shirts and shorts the previous day. This morning we were scrambling for sweatshirts and long pants.
Wow, it’s cold.
Are we still shooting?
Where’s the coffee?
Is there more coffee?
Just some of the thoughts I remember hearing the day of the shoot.
But…we had the crew. We had our talent. We had the permits.
We had Bruno ready to go.
So, we make the best out of it and decided to use the fog to our advantage.
Of course, Bruno being the pro he is, he made everything work to his advantage.
Oddly, I don’t have any shots of him ACTUALLY SHOOTING on this set. Maybe, since it was early in the trip, I was still hanging back a little.
That would change.
The images we did get are still being used. Here’s a couple of the final images. I was happy these were used since I was the one that found this little boardwalk while scouting on my own when the crew was sitting around, deciding how to make the fog work.
Bruno Barbey for Janssen Global Services LLC
Bruno Barbey for Janssen Global Services LLC
So, while the start wasn’t what we expected, we got some good images to use.
Just goes to show, you never know what you’ll get when you get on set… even if you’ve scouted it out well.
More to come…
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