 Ivan Greene on a climbing wall at New York’s Chelsea Piers Sports Center. |
As someone who has labored in the vineyards of editorial assignment photography for more years than I care to recall, the one definite truism I’ve observed over time is that the operative law of assignment photography is the one written by Murphy ("Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong"). To that nugget, I’d like to add Krist’s Corollary: The simpler the job sounds at first, the more difficult it will become.
Take the accompanying portrait of extreme rock climber Ivan Greene, for instance. It started out as a straightforward outdoor photography assignment. Fellow OP contributor Kevin Spreekmeester was coordinating the photography for a coffee-table book entitled Goose People, about the myriad of personalities—from Antarctic explorers to rock stars to movie directors—all over the world who wear Canadian Goose arctic wear. He asked if I’d like to shoot several interesting people who wear the gear for a charity fundraising project that would mark the company’s 50th anniversary. All proceeds from the book would be donated to Polar Bears International—a great cause and an intriguing assignment if ever there was one—and, of course, I jumped at it.
Among the most interesting of my subjects was extreme rock climber Ivan Greene. He has an urban edge, lives in Manhattan, not Moab, and plays guitar in a rock band to boot. Sometimes a well-known, media-savvy subject can prove to be difficult or demanding to work with and can make the job a bit touchy. But Ivan was enthusiastic and cooperative from the get-go, so that was one big hurdle cleared.
My next concern was the fact that, although Ivan is a world-class climber, I’m not. I explained my need for a location where I might be able to get above him and shoot down as he climbed, without me having to climb up first. In other words, I needed a place to which I could walk, drive or scramble up to get an overhead view.
Not a problem! Ivan had several favorite rock-climbing locations about an hour from New York City that offered just that kind of setup. I could drive up to the top on an upper road and hang over the cliff to shoot down on him as he went through his paces. Man, this was going smoothly, and it was going to be fun—and easy, too!
Now, all we had to do was set a date and shoot. It was January, but the Northeast was experiencing an extremely mild winter, with temperatures in the 50s and even 60s F, and it looked like it was going to stay that way for a few weeks.
But here’s where Murphy the Lawgiver raised his ugly head. It turned out that neither Ivan nor I would be around at the same time in January because of previous commitments. All that lovely weather and all those great locations were going to have to wait until February and, of course, that’s when real winter decided to set in—ice storms, frigid temperatures, snow—you name it! If we were going to get this shot done by the deadline, we’d either have to do it somewhere else in a warmer part of the country or do it indoors.
Traveling south was out due to budget considerations. But Ivan has great connections at Manhattan’s Chelsea Piers Sports Center, and they have one of the largest climbing walls in the country: a 46-foot-high by 100-foot-wide main wall, plus an adjacent 10-foot-high by 73-foot-wide bouldering wall—well over 10,000 square feet of sculpted, three-dimensional imprint climbing surface. It was the perfect solution, except for the lighting.
Not surprisingly, it was dark, and what light he had was provided by mercury-vapor lamps—a limited-spectrum light source that produces ghastly color and contrast. So photographically speaking, we’d be shooting this environmental action portrait in a giant, light-sucking cavern!
"What happened to the fun and easy part?" I thought to myself as I worked out arrangements with the gym’s management. Because of Ivan’s standing in the climbing world and his long association with the Center, they would allow us to get into the area during off hours and wouldn’t charge a usage fee. Insurance regulations, however, required that I provide a $2-million liability certificate indemnifying the facility from any mishaps that might occur during the shoot.
This is business as usual for location work, and a few phone calls to the company that carries my business insurance took care of this bit of red tape. Now, all I had to do was light the place, get Ivan up on the wall and take a picture!