24/08/2009

This several-week trip began in Hong Kong a couple of weeks ago. A week there photographing contemporary interiors for a new book, and attending Hong Kong’s first tea fair, as part of my current book project on tea. Then to near the city of Chongqing in central China, with my Chinese clients who are two years into building a new luxury hot spring resort – the Brilliant at BeiBei. August probably isn’t the ideal time to visit what the Chinese call one of their four ‘stove cities’, an apt description for somewhere that reaches 40 degrees, married to high humidity, but that’s the way the trip worked out. Half of it ‚ the hot spring half, is finished; the rest is a construction site. So just a few days of shooting right now, trying to work up shots that can be used in pre-publicity, with the main shoot scheduled for when the construction is finished, maybe April or May next year. Of course, the bizarre quality of shooting a hot spring in August is that there’s precious little difference in temperature between the water and the air, so you can basically choose between a hot bath or a sauna.

None of the original trees have been cut, and this spring, one of 27, has been designed around an old specimen.

This is one of my occasional commercial jobs, and the shooting method and just about everything else is different from normal (well, what I consider normal) reportage. For a start, we took a model for the hot spring shots, not to concentrate on her, but to give it scale and a sense of the experience — the ‘that could be me’ shot. Not me the photographer, obviously, and I certainly don’t have a figure like that, but for the customers that the shots will be aimed at, in ads, posters, brochures and so on. The other difference from reportage is that everything that can be controlled is controlled, which is pretty much everything except the weather. The special feature of this hot spring, which is natural and has a very long history through its association with a 1,600 year-old Buddhist temple, is that it’s in an old forest on the steep, almost gorge-like banks of the Yaling River, a tributary of the Yangtse.

The way hot springs work is that they’re used mainly in the evening, so the lighting is important and has already been set up by a lighting designer. However, what works for the dark-adapted eye doesn’t, as I guess we’re all familiar with, necessarily work for the camera. Really high dynamic range, hot spots burning into the image all over the place, and for me in particular, the problem of getting a sense of the depth of the forest. So I actually do need to put lighting in place, but do it carefully so as not to destroy the atmosphere that the architect’s lighting designer has gone to such trouble to create. And I need to get the time of shooting just right – basically, that narrow window just after sunset when there’s a dark blue dusk-light suffusing the forest, before the sky goes pitch black.

First step is a daytime recce, as we’re going to have only an hour and a bit each day of useful dusk. A selection of them looks like this….

Well, not much romantic atmosphere there, except perhaps in the first, but the value of this is to check camera angles, composition, lens focal length, and where to site the tripod. Next, on to the lighting issues. Having just flown from London via Hong Kong, I’m definitely not carrying lighting, and plan to hire it from the city, which will add a day of sourcing. But then, a discovery — although the spa is not yet open, they already have the stage lighting needed for evening dance performances. And it’s in a small storeroom….

…although there’s no-one yet trained to use it. But it’s powerful enough to light up an area of forest, and we gather together electricians and others and work out how to configure it.

Then some of the pools need cleaning after the recent rain….

.. and by mid-afternoon were in shape for an evening shoot, and get the shot at the top of the page, which is aimed at conveying atmosphere more than anything else. Incidentally, in case you wondered where the lighting comes into this, this is the pre-lighting, pre-model shot, at 7:40 pm, a few minutes after sunset (it’s a deep forest and facing away from the sunset). The final shot, above, was taken 25 minutes after this….

…with a repeat of the final for comparison…

The use of all that lighting (two focused spots, two simple mirror-backed spots and four uplighters) was intentionally restrained, and at the last minute we made improvised use of a bedsheet to soften the spots.

Then, while August in ‘stove city’ is better know for rain and muggy weather, we had the luck of a good sunrise, so a pity to waste it….

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