The Sony shoot would take place in two different countries over a period of almost a week. The photographer on the job was Todd Antony. We had worked with Todd before, but this would be the first time we had worked with him whilst he was the photographer.

So we begin…. and we begin in the desert. Normally when you tell people you are off into the desert they will instantly think of a place with intense heat, no water, large sand dunes, and the wind constantly blowing dust into your face. Well this wasn’t the case for us (at least not entirely any way). We were heading into a photographer friendly desert. Not too far from civilization, plenty of water (mostly in cool boxes), and the clincher that keeps virtually any photographer happy…… the virtual lack of dust! The reason being this particular desert appeared to be made of large slabs of dried mud/clay, although there was no sand, it still undulated in a very dune like fashion. It covered the entire landscape in what was described as Rhinoceros skin.

So for a few days we spent most of our day in this bizzare landscape. We were shooting cars, so it was the normal very early morning starts, and the usual back to location for sundown affair. Once we left the strange landscape, we would head back to our equally weird looking hotel. The hotel was on the edge of the ‘desert’ and it had looked like someone had dropped a load of shipping containers onto the ground and hey presto there’s a hotel.

When we had finished with the desert, we headed off to France where things were decidedly back to kind of normality. Or objective in France was to capture a classic looking car on the coast at sunset. We reccied and Todd agreed on a location very early on. So all we had to do was make sure that everything was ready for sundown. We tried once, it looked as though it was going to be spectacular, when all of a sudden cloud blew in from nowhere, and covered the bottom of the sky. Attempt 1 had failed. The second attempt, we headed out to the location well before the sunset was due, again it was going to be a great one… that was until it found out we wanted it to be. It was almost a carbon copy of the previous night. The only difference there was between the two evenings was that on the second night we managed to attract an audience, a crowd of onlookers gathered around us to see why a bunch of people needed so much equipment just to take a picture of a sunset. So we were now 2 attempts down, and we only had 1 full day left of the shoot, the weather day, everyone had their fingers crossed. We headed down even earlier because we were also taking the risk of moving the set-up along the coast to a lower position. Everyone was watching the sky looking for the low cloud that had ruined it for the last 2 night. It didn’t rear it’s ugly head, we got an almost perfect sunset. It was the perfect finish to a great shoot.

The celebrations began that evening, and the whole crew was relieved that the weather decided to come good for us.

More of Todd’s work can be found at www.toddantony.com

Behind the scenes pictures from the Sony Shoot: