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Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Printer Shot

When Epson approached Jeff Schewe to photograph their latest professional printer, they wanted something different

It was during that discussion that we determined that somewhere, something had been lost in translation. It seemed that while Mark really did want me to shoot something, he was thinking more along the lines of a cool product shot, not some sort of elaborate set shot, let alone a trip to Monument Valley.

Once we sort of got past all that, I pulled out an additional concept that I had in my back pocket (never go into a meeting without a fallback concept). Since Mark was so hopped up on how cool the printer looked, I said, “Well, why don't we hide the exterior and do a composite of the external and the internals of the printer.”

I'm not sure whether Mark and Dano really understood what it would look like, but they thought it could be cool, and yes, Mark could arrange for both a real printer as well as one from which the insides were stripped out; he'd send me the insides.

This started in June and the deadline for the image was the end of August since Epson was going to be announcing the new printer at Photokina at the end of September. By mid-July, I was thinking that I'd see a printer (and some guts) soon. Well, due to unforeseen delays, of course, I didn't get the stuff until the end of July. And, of course, some stuff was missing—like any software and ink carts with labels. It seemed that was a problem that I was going to have to work around.