Looking for locations

One of the most beautiful parts of this job is to go out and look for exteriors when they have to be natural environments.
Incredible beaches, forests at any time of the year, be it spring, summer, autumn or winter, mountains, fields of crops with colourful flowers, rivers, lakes, waterfalls, endless cliffs…

Places that in any circumstance make you forget that you are working and where recording or photographing shots to be able to make videos afterwards is a real pleasure.

Looking for locations is absolutely necessary because you can’t always be taking stock photos in the same places, nor can you go out and improvise, because if you don’t find a place with a nice enough background or with a well oriented light, your photos and videos turn out mediocre.

So whether it is for a yoga session, sport, trekking in the mountains, for a simple person breathing in a beautiful natural environment to transmit freedom, for a beach session with one or several people or even for any urban environment, you need to know where you are going to go to take the photos.

In our case, since we also move a lot of photo and video equipment, clothes and props, we also need those locations to be close to an area where we can park the van we move around in because if we have to move all the equipment on foot, it would be extraordinarily complicated and that makes finding locations a bit more difficult than usual.

In addition, due to the low commission that we photographers receive for each photo, we have to take many different photos per session, and that requires constant changes of clothes, which makes it unfeasible to spend an hour walking to get to the location where all the equipment and clothes are, because we would arrive tired, it would take us a long time to get there and the model would probably end up sweating.

It’s not something that can’t be done but for 90% of the sessions the ideal is to have a nice and striking location that is as close as possible to the van.

Sometimes we go out to look for locations on a single day or several days depending on the distance, I can go alone, or most of the time, I take the opportunity to take a model to practice photography or to see how the light looks on a person, the blur of the background at a specific time and so we take the opportunity to take some stock photos to sell, because you never know, and that´s the reality, if when you return to that stage it will be exactly the same as it was when you went there for the first time.

You learn very quickly that once you have located the exterior, you have to do the session as soon as possible, as the landscapes change a lot depending on the seasons of the year. Also, the sun takes a different path depending on the time of year. Its path is much shorter in winter and much wider in summer and it does not rise or set in the same place, so the light is different in January and March.

Therefore, finding a good scenery in January is good for taking pictures in January and finding a scenery that is beautiful in summer is good for taking pictures in summer. If you go at a different time of the year, you will find a totally different landscape and not only will the trees have changed colour or be bare if it is autumn or winter but you may find snow,  forests with dull greens in summer, rivers with more or less flow, full or empty lakes, or even if there have been floods the river may have brown water, something that can happen even in a swamps.

Beaches are least prone to change, unless they are very close to forests, but then you depend on the state of the sea and the tides. You can have a day with good weather, or you can have terrible weather. What varies a lot here is the sunrise and sunset. You can have a very good sunset on a beach in summer and in winter it is no longer hidden by the sea, or the other way around.

To avoid wandering around aimlessly and risking not finding anything, normally before setting off you establish an area that you have already looked for on the internet, either by searching on Google or on Google Earth, looking for areas that may be of photographic interest, a beautiful or very striking background, whether it be a beach, a mountain or a city, and then you go to that area to see what the surroundings are like and whether they will be useful for the photographs you intend to take. Sometimes you also find scenery that gives you ideas for the photographs of a specific session.

But despite of everything, no matter how hard you have tried and no matter how much work you have put into finding those settings and how beautiful they are, nobody can guarantee that when you come back the weather will be on your side and that you will find a sunny landscape or a calm sea or that there won’t be a concentration of people doing whatever, as has happened to us at times, in cultivated areas in season, on beaches or even in the mountains. The weather usually makes things quite difficult during the sessions, most of the year, and it is a difficult task to improvise to adapt to the situation.

For the few times when everything works out, having found good locations guarantees you sessions with really spectacular light and backgrounds, which greatly enhance the content you are creating.
At the same time that we look for beautiful areas where we can take the photos, we take the opportunity to record shots that we can then use to elaborate the making of videos, showing these locations as you can see on our website.