Shadow Play [Rf Photo of the Day]

Photo © Max Wanger

For Nordstrom’s Back to School catalogue, Max Wanger (2011 PDN Rising Star of Wedding Photography) was lifted above ground in a cherry picker to shoot a direct overhead shot of kids playing. “We had a limited amount of time to pull off the shot,” says the L.A.-based photographer, who shot this at the track at Palisades Charter High School, “so we did our best to lay out the kids’ positions and props beforehand.”

Once he was stationed above and the kids were settled below, he says, it all came down to melding the varying mini moments—a boy running in and out of the frame, another kid bouncing a ball, girls jumping rope—into one frame. “It was fun to shoot from this bird’s-eye perspective, and it was actually quite calming because I was up there with only my assistant, Keith,” Wanger says.

They had to get clever with a couple of gear-related matters. Being in the cherry picker, Wanger couldn’t be tethered to a computer so Keith built a “bucket pulley” system to share CF cards with the crew on the ground below to load in and see what the photographer was capturing. They also brought an HMI and strobes in case the sunlight didn’t show up, and as it turned out, it was overcast that morning, Wanger says, so they mimicked the light with their backups.

(Shot with a Canon 5D Mark III and a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens.)

Check out more Photos of the Day, and email rangefinder@emeraldexpo.com for submissions.