This weekend I’m travelling to Gothenburg with a friend to work on some photography. An idea we had for my friends portfolio was to take some product photos of the rental car we had (a Volvo S40). We thought that taking the pictures on the beach by the water with the sun setting over the water in the background would be a nice idea.

Said and done – the car was backed out on the beach and the cameras and flashes were all rigged. Pictures were taken (hopefully I’ll be able to show some of then on this blog later on) and different composures were thought about. At about a quarter past nine we gave up due to the temperature dropping rapidly and the light vanishing quickly. After we had packed all the gear in the car we got in and drove off the beach.

Or atleast, so we had imagined the end of this particular photoshoot. It turns out that the car was terribly unable to get itself off the beach. All it did was dig itself a deeper hole in the sand. I tried reversing. I tried starting in second gear (which is a known trick for slippery conditions). I tried rocking the car back and forth. No go. We were seriously stuck on a pitch black beach with absolutely no one around to help us. Did I mention that it was cold?

Sometimes in life you need a break. We found a left over piece of an old jetty lying around in the edge of the water which we figured we could use as skidmat for putting under atleast one of the front wheels (for those of you who don’t know – the S40 is a front-wheel-drive car). So now it was our turn to dig in order to get the skidmat placed infront of one of the wheels at a proper level – basically trying to undo all the digging that the car had done. I have to tell you that I have a completely newfound respect for people who compete in a Paris – Dakar rally. What we see of that rally on TV is the action, the speed and the thrill. Not the endless amounts of hours they must spend on digging out their cars from gigantic sand dunes.

In the end we had to dig and roll/push the car onto the skidmat (rinse & repeat) for well over an hour before we finally had solid ground under the wheels. And we were exhausted! Partially from the frantic diggig, but I was also worked up by the fact that I, for a while, seriously doubted that we’d get the car out of there at all without getting towed by a tractor. And that wouldn’t be happening until the next day. I can’t describe the joy of finally getting the car back on a real road!

So, what does this tell us?

• A photoshoot needs a certain amount of bodily pain and mental agony – it makes the pictures look better in the end.
• If you’re gonna take pictures of a car on a beach – make sure that you bloody well can get it off the beach as easy as you got it on the beach!
• If you are gonna to the proverbial “extra mile” for a photoshoot (Stockholm to Gothenburg in this case) – be prepared for having huge troubles with the last extra centimeter. You might need a shovel. =)
• Getting a car off a beach without a helicopter or someone to tow you out from there is gonna make your clutch smell funny. A slight resemblance to burnt condom is the best way to describe it.

Time to go to sleep now and dream unpleasant dreams about sand. With some luck I might be able to publish pictures of the ripped up beach tomorrow or sometime after that.

Update:
Last night I processed some of the pictures taken and published them. Go have a look! Some of the pictures are linked directly from the text above as well.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 02:31 and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.