Ken Knoll Photography

Last week, I had the opportunity to help out a friend who works at the university. One of the institute’s more prestigious projects, the so-called quadrocopter (like a helicopter, only with four instead of one rotor), needed to be photographed for the all-new website. Should this be any interesting to me? You betcha! Trying to make the nerd stuff look interesting for generations of students to come sounds like a great challenge.

The machine

And in fact, the quadrocopter itself doesn’t look all that spectacular. The guys at the institute could probably spend an hour elaborating on the inner values of that mean machine (that I refer to as the robocopter when the professor’s not around), but from the outside, it’s not all that impressive. It’s maybe 40 to 50cm in diameter, has those big soft balls at the four ends so that can land safely and a lot of electronics in the middle.

So my friend and I thought “why go the easy way if we can make this thing look like an UFO?”. Add some drama! With fog, landing lights, and everything, this thing has to look huge! So the way to go was clear and we set up a plan for the shoot. The perspective was more or less given, since we wanted the quadrocopter to look big and impressive (thus use a wide angle from below) and use the whole image in a rather long heading image (so the perspective had to be from the side rather than from straight above or below). To create that UFO look and feel, we decided to add dramatic shadows by setting the robocopter up in a very dark improvised studio and light with very tight spotlights. To make some highlights in the area around the robo visible, we decided to add some fog – the part that makes this shot work.

How do you create fog? Well, I asked an old friend of mine, who’s in the sound & light biz – these guys must know. I quickly understood that a hazer (i.e., a fog machine) would be the wrong choice, ’cause we had the whole thing set up in a small room and didnt’t want to die early from smoke poisoning, plus, we didn’t need to have fog everywhere, but just in the right place. Dry ice was the way to go. Throw pellets into warm water, it gives you 30 seconds of great, dense fog that you can play with. Fortunately, we managed to buy dry ice in a city nearby. The fog it creates is heavier than air, so it stays on the set if you block all the exits.

Speaking of, the setup for the whole thing was a little more complex than the stuff that I normally do. First, we darkened the room with large dark curtains which I still have from my Photo Booth Series. Then we set up two tables as our playing ground, framed them with cardboard on all sides to block the fog. Since we were going for very defined dark and light areas, we didn’t want to have any light bouncing around, so we put black fabric on the table and the sides. Also, since we were going to shoot upwards, we put more black fabric up against the wall on one side of the table.

The robo itself was rigged easier than we thought: Actually, we wanted to rig all four sides to stands – however, After I attached the first of the four sides to the stand we thought that it did look cool enough to do the job. The opposite side simply lasted on the table. We set a heater right next to the robo to warm up the water for the dry ice and we were ready to shoot.

As you might know, being a photographer on a budget means that I do not possess a gazillion flashes. Thus, we took one flash, put a super tight cereal box snoot on it and took about 300 single pictures, each highlighting a certain area. The fog starts to create a pretty dense carpet if you don’t do something about it, so we just whirled and blew the fog until it started to look interesting. In the end, we selected the exposures we liked best and stacked them into one big file to mask them out. Piece of cake, but still a lot work (and quite hard to keep track of which layer shows which part of the image). A lot of work for one single picture, but a great experience and great fun, too.