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Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Jose Manuel Vidaurre: Making A Splash!

In mastering the art of stopping liquids in motion, advertising photographer Jose Manuel Vidaurre fills a unique niche

This Article Features Photo Zoom

When Vidaurre isn’t working with liquid, he’s off capturing people in India, a country to which he travels often. While he enjoys visiting places all over the world, Vidaurre keeps returning to India for its food, culture and people. Hitting the streets of Jaipur, Bengal and Mathura to take pictures requires only a camera and a couple of lenses. The experience is vastly different from the jobs he shoots in his high-tech Miami studio.

While some of his images are composites, most are captured in one shot, and that philosophy goes back to his film days when getting the job done in one frame was required. An assignment for Schweppes that consisted of two cans submerged in water was taken on Kodak 4x5 film with everything accomplished in one shot.

Whether a one-shot capture or not, all have earned Vidaurre a long list of awards across three continents, including the IPA Photographer of the Year in Special Effects, the London International Advertising Award and some 50 others from the FIAP, the International Color Awards, Prix de la Photographie Paris and Creativity Annual. Kingston Technology named him an “Icon of Photography,” and he was recently selected by Lürzer’s Archive in Germany as one of the “200 Best Advertising Photographers Worldwide.”

Vidaurre captures images in RAW and processes them using Phase One’s Capture One before importing them to Photoshop. Inside his state-of-the-art studio, which features a 40x30-foot soundstage, Vidaurre’s equipment consists of a Sinar p2 4x5/8x10 view camera, Mamiya RZ67 Pro II SLR, Phase One P25 digital back, Elinchrom power packs, moonlights and softboxes, custom liquid tanks with pressure controls, an electronic infrared trigger with delay and a host of other specialty stop-motion equipment. His clients include Seagram, Nestlé, Bacardi, American Express, Mattel, Kellogg’s, Gatorade, Absolut, Nabisco, Johnson & Johnson, Kodak, Kraft, Pantene, Hilton, General Electric, SABMiller, Sony, and the list goes on and on.

When he’s not working with liquid, chances are Vidaurre is off shooting in India, a country that appeals to him in every way, from the culture and food to the religion and especially the people. It’s also a shooting experience that’s completely different from his professional work. Instead of a highly advanced studio where everything is designed to control and execute a moment perfectly, he’s out on the street capturing the unpredictable and colorful scenes of everyday life in places like Jaipur, Bengal and Mathura.

“Visually, it’s very rich,” he says. “I’m very minimal on these trips. I don’t take anything but the camera and a couple of lenses.”

Ultimately, Vidaurre is very much like the subject that has launched his career. He’s always in motion. Even now, after creating countless splash images for a variety of expensive ad campaigns, he continues to push himself artistically.

Concludes Vidaurre, “My goal is to find the optimum millisecond for each shot and freeze it in the most artistic way possible. Even with digital technology, the photography I do never becomes easy.”

To see more of Jose Manuel Vidaurre’s work, visit www.jmv-studio.com.