Raymond Engmark : Photography: Commercial work: Fjellproffen (Shot in Lofoten)

This week has been soley spent in front of the computer catching up on my photoshop work. The fall is here in the North 100% now, so lately I have focused on getting some shooting done before green surroundrings completely vanished. Still, it feels good to finalize some new work, there is a lot (A LOT) of RAW material waiting to be processed, and I can't help feeling a bit stressed.

I do a lot of my work in Photoshop! For me it's not that I always need to work my images in photoshop, but I have learned from some very skilled people how to improve your images (or develop as I would say), and I just can't bring myself to put my work away if I see more potential that I can bring out in photoshop. It's not tampering with it - it's developing. Just because we have quick digital cameras, it's not an excuse to be lazy.

About four weeks ago I spendt a weekend at the island of Værøy in lovely Lofoten. For a long time I have been trying to shoot some good commercial pictures for Fjellproffen (contractor), but they often do work in between houses and other not very good surroundings for commercial images of this kind. So when they got an assingment in Lofoten, I packed up my gear and got on the ferry for a five hour ride into the great Norwegian oceans.

This was not an easy assingment. There was "a ton" of gear, no assistant and this is a small island in the middle of the ocean! Wind gusts can come in without any warning, and as the behind the scenes pictures will show, it can go from blue skies to pouring down in a matter of minutes. One time i had spent one hour rigging up, and the weather turned on me, and it was just getting the gear inside the car without shooting any pictures at all.

Here are the results - hope you enjoy them!

There is a great efford behind creating these images. I spent several days planning in advance of traveling to the island (what backdrops I wanted, what light I wanted, what flashes I wanted to bring, which colors I wanted in the picture and many many other things). When I got to the island I spent one day traveling around and shooting test pictures and also testing how the flashes worked with lighting up such big objects.

I spent one day shooting the actual raw images I needed, and one day later back in Bodø shooting some elements for the pictures. In the end I developed the pictures in photoshop, and I did not punch in and out, but I certainly did not spend anything less than 40 hours, but I would guess around 50 hours.

I do not beleive in using plugins and filters to get it done quickly. Photography is a craftmanship, and I take pride in doing my work manually. I try to acheive not only photo realistic, but pixel perfect. I want my customers to be happy with my work, even if they want to blow it up to 5x3 meters. And that is the thing about those quick plugins; the give your picture a cool effect right away ... but most of the time it completely ruins your pixels, and it really looks like hell when you get up close on a big print.

This is not me trying to blow my own horn, I am merely explaining so that it will be easier for my clients and customers to understand why I want more money than a photographer that don't give a damn about how it all comes out. Check out behind the scenes pictures, it is just shot with a 5 mp mobile phone, but still, it gives you some idea on how an unprocessed picture looks in comparison.

So to my potential future customers; if you and a compeeting business were advertising in the same newspaper; which picture would you have in your ad? The one that gets the attention of the consumers and brings them into the ad, or the one that just merges into the newspaper and just makes you turn the page. And compared to the price of advertising, getting the best photographer for the job will be a drop in the ocean, no matter what.

Compare yourself - here is the behind the scenes pictures! (This is something I need to be better at, I have had a lot of crazy shoots in the wierdest surroundings that lever shows in the finished work).