Beautiful things happen when creative people collaborate. That’s certainly the case with Newport, Kentucky-based photographer Jonathan Robert Willis’ last personal project, “Bird’s Eye View.” Jonathan had been sitting on the idea of an overhead lifestyle shoot for a few years, but it wasn’t until his wardrobe/set stylist Jukielo of Jukielo & Cece reached out about doing some shots of youth loitering that it became a reality.
So I pitched the concept, “what if we placed the camera 20-25 feet above the ground and shot from a downward perspective, using the ground as the canvas and figure out ways to naturally get kids to face the sky?” These initial set/stories stemmed from experiences of our youth. She was into it. She has a great sense of coordinating looks and casting and that was exactly what I needed her to drive.
The most exciting part of the project for Jonathan was giving himself the freedom to depart from his typical approach:
It’s refreshing practice to change the fundamental approach of shooting as a way to keep yourself from retreating back to your typical way of solving a photographic problems. Working with the camera directly above the set allows you to focus on a different set of values. Texture and ground detail was critical, things like cracks and painted lines were really considered and they really carry the compositions. Finding ways to incorporate the edges to activate the entire frame was also a major consideration. Some of these ideas go back to Intro to 2-d college classes where we discussed the principles of design. This was a good refresher.
Jonathan says prepro involved a number of conversations with Jukielo: they sketched out rough compositions, talked themes and casted for 10 kids. The creative team got lucky with a beautiful production day, so the project was shot using only natural light. As you would imagine, the main challenge was figuring out how to get the camera up high enough to see a good piece of the ground without seeing the structure that was holding it. Jonathan said they looked into renting a lift, but the shadows would be difficult to work around and a couple of the locations were not suited for the machine. In the end, Jonathan decided to create a rig using HI-HI stands fully extended with a metal cross bar that they built from pieces. That way they could quickly get the camera 22 feet up and 19 feet across, allowing them to have a 15 x 23 foot frame. Focusing on the land with the camera hanging 12-24 feet above the ground was also difficult.
There were many up and downs with the rigging. The pool set up was painstakingly slow. Working over water we had to lower the camera and rotate it off the set on the dry land to make focus changes. Plus one of stands was in a thorn bush and on an rocky path. The other big challenge was making sure the camera was perfectly level with the ground. All of these things took time but it paid off to be meticulous.
The project is still new, and Jonathan has three more sets he wants to execute, but ultimately he’d love to shoot more of them for a client. Overall, he’s thrilled with how they turned out, and he was happy to shoot something “outside of his sweet spot” to create some exciting new personal work.
To see more of Jonathan’s work, visit his website, jonbob.com.