Conceptual photographer Peter Holst was recently approached by the team at Immersion Creative to bring their client’s dreamy underwater project to life.
The client, Shearwater, designs and manufactures technology for technical divers, with one of their missions being to offer a level of ease during stressful underwater situations. With the concept in hand, Peter dove head-first into planning. Though, just like deep-sea diving, photographers often run into some challenges.
Shearwater wanted something that ‘popped’ out from their competitors traditionally more generic approach to editorial advertising and something that spoke to the adventurous spirit of their target market. Hence the mermaid scenario.
Locating a real mermaid proved to be too time consuming and elusive, so we had to find talent that was both the right fit visually and who also had experience diving underwater with a large mermaid tail for underwater captures.
Acting as his own location scout, Peter determined he’d need a suitable place that had easy access to both a portable studio & indoor pool as the talent would only be available for a narrow window of time.
Mermaids are mythical underwater creatures. While Peter isn’t himself an expert diver, he was able to break down the shoot into manageable parts. He later combined the final results in the post processing.
I am not scuba certified, but that didn’t pose an issue, as the main component of the shoot was shot on a seamless backdrop on dry land. This included the diver and the main mermaid character. The underwater shots required for the piece were the mermaids swimming in the background and the mermaids hair. For this, the go pro provided decent enough results to work from.
Despite the fact that this was Peter’s first time producing any content underwater, the client was still thrilled with the whole process and outcome. They even expressed interest in continuing the theme of implementing mythical sea creatures for future ads.
See more of Peter’s work on his website.
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