The Client Relationship
The work required two very different approaches over two years: dynamic, industrial lifestyle photography of people and highly planned productions involving enormous industrial machinery.
They needed photography ranging from environmental executive portraits and industrial lifestyle images to large-scale photographs of their Stargate 3D printers, which they used to build rocket fuselages from metal wire. They also wanted to incorporate the company’s signature blue into the imagery.
Scaling the Production
The first challenge was shooting the 25-foot-tall Stargate 3D printers used to make rocket housings, along with environmental portraits of their CEO and executive staff. Up until then, it was the largest and most complex photographic project I had directed.
The 3D printer frame stood about 25 feet tall, and the goal was to make the technology look dramatic and refined. The challenge was evenly lighting the whole machine with 12 heads on towers. I knew how to light it in theory, but I had never lit anything that large before, so I brought assistants with extensive technical production experience. Even then, none of us had shot anything that large before.
The second, even greater challenge was photographing Relativity Space's 4th-generation 3D Printer for its public debut, and they needed a beautiful rendition of the technology. The printer was a massive upright disc with a near matte black finish, and they also wanted the imagery to incorporate Relativity Space’s signature blue. For this, we had to scale our lighting plan to about 14,000 watts of strobe lights, most of which were mounted on two 25 ft-tall towers and shot through a 20-by-30-foot silk mounted on two more 25-foot-tall towers.
I needed three photography assistants with film and automotive production experience to pull off this project safely and efficiently.
We completed four setups that day: three views of the printer and a fourth featuring a smaller robotic welder.. We had no close calls, and everything went as planned. Of course, I had a week to plan the project and an amazing team.
Production Planning and Crew Coordination
Both Stargate 3D printers took me about a week to plan and involved scouting with my first assistant and coming up with a lighting scheme and equipment list for the printers, environmental portraits, and industrial lifestyle photography.
This is my favorite kind of aerospace photography project because there is so much at stake, and it demands all my attention to plan for every eventuality. Because of the scale of the production, there was very little margin for error, so planning and crew coordination had to be precise. In short, there was no room for failure. On top of that, there was a video crew from Relativity Space filming the whole project, so I did feel a bit of pressure to perform.
The Result
Over two years, we created a broad image library covering Relativity Space’s executives, employees, manufacturing processes, robotics, and Stargate 3D printers. The imagery gave the company a consistent visual language for presenting both its people and aerospace manufacturing technology.
