How we did it: The August Atomic cover

Under the scenes of the beautiful August Atomic cover.

It was two days after Sydney was promised its “cyclone”, the clouds have blown away and the water was icy cold.

It was critically important we had a bright blue sky for the shoot, the sun shining through the water was the make or break factor.

We’d secured the use of a mate’s pool for the day. Photographer Jason Busch, creative director Sam Grimmer and yours truly were on location, having spent the weeks leading up brainstorming the concept for our water cooling cover. It had to be great. We were tempted to again use a model, as we did with the legendary issue 6 cover, but that had been done and we wanted to move into new territory.

Logan had the dunking idea, and we knew it was the one. We needed a large volume of water, and considered a variety of solutions, including a large aquarium that we could shoot through the glass.

In the end we realized the hard way was the right way. Jason would have to be in the water. Under the water, shooting up as we chucked the case in.

We briefly toyed with the idea of shooting above the water, showing the splash as it hit the surface. But we knew we wanted the deep impact of the case pushing aside the water, with the sun shining through from above. Something sort of like Nirvana’s Nevermind cover.

A few test drops showed that the case needed to be weighted for maximum punch through the surface. A sandbag clipped in made all the difference, though added to the all-day effort Sam heroically put in heaving it up high and then hauling the thing out of the water, at least 50 times through the day.

Getting the focal point right proved the biggest challenge, as Jason could only guess where the case would land. We tried loads of settings, each time having to exit the water and remove the camera from its waterproof housing to view the results.

After a morning of that, with the case never really exactly in focus, and saying all the way that “there’s no way autofocus will work well enough in the water’s blur” we decided to trust Canon and see what happened. Voila! Instant sharp. GG Canon! The EOS-1Ds Mark II really is a piece of work.

Remember too that we were working in swimming pool water, with it's murky chlorinated, dust particle imperfection. Luckily it was a very well maintained North Shore pool.

By day’s end we’d taken at least 50 pics, Jason had hypothermia despite the wetsuit and Sam had lofted a weighted PC case several times to the Moon and back. A location appraisal of the shots showed our work was done. We had a vast library of stunning shots, each one wildly different, as the chaos of hydrodynamics dictated.

But one stood out. It had energy, it had the most beautiful plunging water displacement, it had the sun lighting up not just the water's surface, but also the edges of the water cavity the case created as it dug in and it had bubbles zooming off in all the right places. It also had the case positioned just right in a perfect 3/4 view. So many shots were rejected because the case went this way or that, straight after hitting the water.

Some careful pre-press correction and it came up looking quite lovely. We’d at one point considered shopping the pool tiles out, but in the end left them in as they add a nice ‘underwatery’ feel.

Stay tuned for special edition wallpapers!

Well worth the wet

Equipment:

Camera: Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II

Camera housing: Aquatech DV-4

Shutter speed: 1/3200
Aperture: F4.0

Metering: Evaluative

ISO speed: 200

Lens: 17-35mm (shot @17mm)

Image size: 3328x4992

Image quality: RAW


Following are making-of shots from the day. A great day!