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Photographing people on the edge of a skyscraper in San Francisco

vonwong.com

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Re: Photographing people on the edge of a skyscraper in San Francisco

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because 99.9% of the time those inbuilt reflexes are what keep you and others alive; people who don't have them get Darwin awards. I was glad to see they used safety equipment, especially since they were working with non-professionals, but I was annoyed that they didn't mention it in the article and played it down in preference of the breathless self-affirming schtick. Safety protocols matter, because they're what ma…

> If you want an entourage to witness how badass you are (as opposed to leveraging that through your creative work) then you're a walking liability. Yeah. It's like the old joke: what are every true redneck's last words? "Hey y'all, watch this!"

"Hold my beer!"

Re: Photographing people on the edge of a skyscraper in San Francisco

#32
post #13

The final pictures are so heavily over-produced that they look incredibly fake-- which is a shame and leaves me totally baffled. It looks like someone literally painted the figure on the picture. The only time anxiety kicked in was the picture of the whole team posing for a shot at the corner.

Sorry you feel that way :( We had home-made budget costumes that were hand painted so this was the best solution. On the flip side though, I think you'll enjoy these behind the scenes without photoshop : https://www.dropbox.com/s/y5ixzup47wcm1tw/BTS_katherine-2.jp... (theres more on the dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bqtxeldmqiacm9y/AACk0lp0tl9ncGvzl... )

Honestly, I feel the same way as stevecalifornia.

I figure, if you are going to process the image so heavily, why bother even using a real rooftop. These images don't look real. They are, so why shouldn't they?

Re: Photographing people on the edge of a skyscraper in San Francisco

#34
post #13

The final pictures are so heavily over-produced that they look incredibly fake-- which is a shame and leaves me totally baffled. It looks like someone literally painted the figure on the picture. The only time anxiety kicked in was the picture of the whole team posing for a shot at the corner.

Sorry you feel that way :( We had home-made budget costumes that were hand painted so this was the best solution. On the flip side though, I think you'll enjoy these behind the scenes without photoshop : https://www.dropbox.com/s/y5ixzup47wcm1tw/BTS_katherine-2.jp... (theres more on the dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bqtxeldmqiacm9y/AACk0lp0tl9ncGvzl... )

Yeah, the raw photos are more intense for me.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bqtxeldmqiacm9y/AACk0lp0tl9ncGvzl... All are awesome though, great work.

Re: Photographing people on the edge of a skyscraper in San Francisco

#36
post #19

The final pictures are so heavily over-produced that they look incredibly fake-- which is a shame and leaves me totally baffled. It looks like someone literally painted the figure on the picture. The only time anxiety kicked in was the picture of the whole team posing for a shot at the corner.

This was exactly my thought too. Why bother with all this hustle when the final images are so blurred that they might as well have been painted from the start. :-O

There was a trend in photography that began at the end of the 19th century called Pictorialism, which emphasized soft focus and significant retouching[1]. It began to fall out of fashion in the nineteen-teens when its most prominent voice, Alfred Stieglitz, embraced modernism[2]. Interestingly, even Ansel Adams started as a pictorialist before embracing "straight" photography. Adams became an incredibly outspoken critic of pictorialism, going so far as to call the last well-known pictorialist, William Mortensen, "the antichrist" years after Mortensen's death[3].

Of course, these things have a way of going full-circle, and—today—digital pictorialism is the big thing. It'll pass in a few years.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictorialism (some images below the fold are NSFW'ish)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Stieglitz#O.27Keeffe_and...

[3] http://www.ishootfilm.org/blog/2014/10/20/11-the-incredibly-...

Re: Photographing people on the edge of a skyscraper in San Francisco

#37
post #10

That rigging looked outrageous. All I saw was one guy holding onto the models. If a model slipped and fell, that guy won't have stood a chance in holding them back. Hopefully the person was themselves hooked into the roof, and the rigging was hooked into the roof, with him acting on belay. But I certainly didn't see that. I'm so glad nothing bad happened, but this seemed irresponsible from a safety and technical stan…

Everything was doubly tied down, don't worry :) The person holding was there simply to maintain tension the entire way as the models walked from the side to the edge. As for the camera, the flex comes from the metal itself but it was also extra secured with straps in the event that anything fell loose.

Obviously you were using a small lightweight camera, but a single c-stand and a few sandbags is not really adequate for this sort of work. Yeah, it'll work fine 99 times out of 100. It's the 100th time that you overengineer for. Those rotary clamps sometimes fail, eg because sufficient strain and a history of overtightening causes one of the screw threads to shear, and then your arm slides right out despite the sandbag on the end. In windy environments the momentary strains are much higher than the steady one of the weight.

Had that happened in this case, the arm and the camera would have been traveling at >100mph when it hit the ground, on the busiest streets in the city. When you rig something that could put someone else at risk, rather than just what's attached to the rig, you build with the assumption that each individual component may catastrophically fail.

At the very least, you should have had a second stand farther back with an arm clamped to the near end of your working arm, plus you should have one person on each stand whose only job is to watch the stand. What you have here is OK for the height of a garden shed or the deck of a low-rise apartment building. It's absolutely not OK for the roof of a skyscraper, man.

And that's with the thing just bearing the camera load. You had the models using your load-bearing stand, which you are holding with only one hand, to steady themselves as they step up on the edge wall. They're gripping it well above your point of contact. If one of them lost it, s/he would have pulled the whole rig down, exponentially increasing the chances of the arm coming free. Or the camera coming off its mount. Or the ballast bag on the arm vaulting over the side.

Fort that matter, at the start of the video you're leaning out videotaping yourself with a camcorder that isn't visibly secured to anything and that doesn't have any gaffer's tape securing the battery to the camera. At this height anything that falls presents a deadly danger to the people in the street below. A camcorder battery is certainly heavy enough to kill someone. Sure, you're a careful guy, you've probably never dropped your camera. But even though nobody means to drop a heavy light or an expensive lens or a c-stand or a camera or a sandbag, I've seen it happen many many times in the middle of film production. Shooting without permits is one thing, disregarding well-established safety practices is quite another.

Re: Photographing people on the edge of a skyscraper in San Francisco

#38

What it is about our minds that make it so easy to imagine being up there, on the ledge, looking down, maybe with one foot over... and my palms are sweating heavily already. It's a bit like having a child; I now spend nights worrying about the most ridiculous events that could happen to my daughter. Why do our brains like to torture us like this?

Because 99.9% of the time those inbuilt reflexes are what keep you and others alive; people who don't have them get Darwin awards. I was glad to see they used safety equipment, especially since they were working with non-professionals, but I was annoyed that they didn't mention it in the article and played it down in preference of the breathless self-affirming schtick. Safety protocols matter, because they're what ma…

I was struck by his genuine self-confidence and lack of fear. It didn't come off as daredevil machismo at all. I thought it was inspiring.

Von, I'd be curious to know how you reached that level of comfort? Is it just the way you are, do you have training or experience in stunt work, something else?

Re: Photographing people on the edge of a skyscraper in San Francisco

#40

The final pictures are so heavily over-produced that they look incredibly fake-- which is a shame and leaves me totally baffled. It looks like someone literally painted the figure on the picture. The only time anxiety kicked in was the picture of the whole team posing for a shot at the corner.

there are enough videos out of Asia and Russia if you want to feel real anxiety. The daring do of so many young people never ceases to amaze me.

While I appreciate the attempt to artfully present this type of thrill seeking little beats a go pro on a stick or one handed hanging from building framework. Dressing up makes it too hollywood and who needs that when real life is all more impressive

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