The Perfect Move
Client Free Project Category Photo Campaign Location Bastei – Saxon Switzerland Location Near Rathen (Saxony), Germany
Motion in the Picture
The entire project started with a doodle in my sketchbook. I repeatedly sketched the movements of climbers, transforming them over and over. Colors were added, and lines indicated the body shape between two static moments. That's where the idea for this project came from. In photography, we are usually bound to a very short moment in time. In earlier projects, such as Day/Night, I integrated time-lapse into a single image. In this image, the goal is to show sequences of movements. What does the perfect movement of an athlete look like, and how can it be represented in a single image? To implement the concept, I take my job title literally. As a photographer, I paint (graphé) with light (photos), in this case with flashlights during a long exposure to capture the movement in the image. There is only one German manufacturer whose flashlights offer the perfect combination of luminosity, weight, robustness, and mounting options: LED-Lenser. After the basic setup of the shoot was clear, we went scouting in Saxon Switzerland to put the theory into practice. With the help of two very talented climbers, we produced the image "The Perfect Move."
What's behind it
Since the individual image components had to be photographed at different times of the day, the final image contains several individual images. The environment and the pensive climber were photographed at dusk to have enough detail and definition in the whole picture, which would not be possible with a night shot. The climbing traces were recorded one hour later in almost complete darkness to achieve sufficiently long exposure times. The climber's last grip on the rock was photographed in the afternoon on a different rock to illuminate the person well. When laying out the image, care was taken to ensure that there were enough open spaces for text layouts. Selective contrast adjustments cause many details to fade into the background, allowing the viewer to concentrate on the important image content.
