How I got that shot... Von Wong does Europe

Photographer: Benjamin Von Wong
Client: Personal project
Project name: Von Wong does Europe
Retouching: Chester van Bommel

His agent calls him a “visual engineer”, but Benjamin Von Wong didn’t visualise the moment that he picked up his first point and shoot from Wal-Mart in 2007, and how it would change his life. “It was a complete fluke [that I picked up photography],” he says. “I’d never really cared much for photography or owned a camera before then.”

While Von Wong had been working as a mining engineer consultant in Nevada, simple shots of the night sky gave way to event photography and creative projects on the side. As the months and years passed, he was able to do more and more elaborate shoots. Companies soon began to reach out to him. And as his following grew, Von Wong was able to generate income through endorsing and reviewing photographic equipment. It’s a “vagabond” lifestyle, says Von Wong, but it’s all part of his journey. “It’s a very spontaneous and random process.”

In January 2011, he finally quit his mining job and leapt into the world of photography full-time. He set up a blog, sharing tips, tutorials, equipment used, settings used and behind the scenes shots of his work. He says that his educational focus makes him appealing to companies who want to sell photography equipment to their market audience. “Over 60% of my fans are semi-professional or professional photographers. I don’t just create pretty work for mobs to follow; I have a targeted audience, for now.”

Entirely self-taught, Von Wong says that what he enjoys most about photography is the ability to create worlds, to make people dream, to inspire. “I love collaborating with talented and unique individuals, travelling and the technical challenges that come with it. It’s not so much about the act of framing and clicking a button but the whole package,” he says.

The concept

Von Wong trip to Europe was crowdfunded via the Indiegogo platform. The project, Von Wong Does Europe, was billed as an “a 4 week adventure shooting epic photos and videos of a variety of artists all across Europe.” He chose Europe so as to be able to visit and experience multiple cities, cultures and languages, all within a short time frame.

The motive was simple: to meld his surreal vision of the world with the talents and skills of a variety of artists across Europe in order to create a series of inspirational and visually stunning photo and video portraits. In return, he promised supporters Photoshop tutorials, exclusive DVDs, photo shoots and sponsorship and branding opportunities for major contributors, as well as exclusive behind the scenes video of the journey and the images produced. The initial amount he sought to raise for the month-long trip was $5,000. This would more than doubled, and a final amount of $12,395 was raised. According to Von Wong, the money went into food, petrol and accommodation, and other costs for equipment that wasn’t already covered by the photography equipment companies that he endorsed.

At the time, he reached out to Chester van Bommel, a creative retoucher based in Belgium with over twenty years of experience. With his passion for visionary artworks, to Von Wong it was an obvious collaboration. “If clients want to find a Photoshopper, they can find somewhere cheaper. But people come to me for a solution. They buy Chester,” says van Bommel.

Von Wong agrees, and given van Bommel’s stature in the retouching world, he was determined to capture a striking portrait of him. He wanted to “capture what went on in the mind of a retoucher.”

“With retouching you have the power to imagine everything in the mind. For me, it had to be extremely fantastical, something would take flight, something that would be larger than life,” says Von Wong. Key to this shot was to place van Bommel in a highly surreal setting, to emphasise the full stretch of his creative abilities and to do justice to the collective vision of van Bommel and Von Wong. But where could they go?

Approach and location

Luckily for Von Wong, the answer lay in Belgium’s array of abandoned urban locations. Long a haven for dedicated urban explorers, he was about to break new ground in capturing the forlorn beauty of these largely untouched locations. He made contact with Thomas Riguelle, a Belgian photographer and urban explorer, who presented him with a variety of abandoned places around Belgium. “Thomas had a portfolio of places and when I saw the location, I knew that I absolutely wanted to shoot there.’”

The location was the old Stock Exchange in Brussels. The building had been closed in 2003 due to fire regulations, and has been abandoned ever since. Except, of course, for urban explorers and photographers like Von Wong. On the day of the shoot, Von Wong recalls waking up at 3am to pick up Chester van Bommel by 5am. “So we’re in the middle of the downtown city and we just lift up this manhole and popped three to four suitcases of equipment, before dropping in and shuffling in there as discreetly as possible,” says Von Wong. It was a challenge for them to contain their excitement at stumbling through barely lit tunnels, on the way to a once-in-a-lifetime shooting opportunity. “You look at these people going into abandoned places. You’ve seen people climbing buildings and you don’t ask, ‘Is that safe?’ you ask, ‘Why do they do it?’ That’s the more interesting question.”

As Von Wong entered the spectacular interior hall that would become the backdrop of his shot, he was completely blown away by its pristine state. “It was just gorgeous,” he remembers. The building itself was constructed in the 19th century to replace an earlier building that had burned down in 1858. Von Wong and van Bommel immediately scouted around to find appropriate props, and located a desk and a typewriter that had been left in the building.

Gear and lighting

Von Wong initially shot the piece as a panoramic and later stitched the eight images together. “I wanted to capture the vastness of the space without the traditional wide-angle distortion that you normally get from using a 14-24mm,” he said. To do that, he shot on a tripod with a 50mm lens on a Nikon D700, which provided him with the dynamic range that captured the whole view of the abandoned place. The camera was tethered onto his laptop that was also plugged into an Innovatronix Explorer XT, a battery-powered inverter to ensure he didn’t run out of power during the shoot.

As for lighting, Von Wong relied on five speed lights including a mix of Nikon SB-700, SB-800 and SB-900. Three of them were placed on the ground to create the rooftop lighting needed to illuminate the arches, while a FourSquare softbox was used as a backlight. A shoot-through umbrella was used as front fill, to light van Bommel.

Retouching

Von Wong says it’s always impossible to separate retouching from the photography. “If you do a terrible job taking the photograph, it’ll be infinitely harder to get the retouching right.” The shot happened to be the first to be captured in the series in his European tour, but was the last one published due to the significant post-production required to produce the final result.

“The base image itself is a panoramic of approximately 8 images. Layers would be impossible to count and it spanned eight Photoshop files at various intervals of the editing,” Von Wong says. “The editing was done in phases. As the bird was slowly constructed up, it eventually began taking up so much space that saving the file became extremely long and tedious. The only solution was to continuously flatten the image and move on. Since I hate loosing data, I saved the independent files to retain all layers,” Von Wong says.

Most of the retouching was focused on the creation of the bird. Von Wong had chosen an eagle as they had previously done a shoot with eagles, and also to tie in with another photo where he and his videographer Erwan Cloerac were pursued by eagles. “It began with a sketch of the bird (what position was it going to be in), then trying to fit the pieces so the hard edges would fit the right areas. Each area was masked slowly and just gradually pieced together and layered. Once all the “geometry of the bird was in place, the final step was to add on the shading to make things “believable”, keeping in mind how the light was supposed to fall onto it,” he says. As for why wood was the choice of material, Von Wong believes the answer is obvious. “The reason we chose wood was because we wanted to make the entire environment work together – it wouldn’t have made sense for the bird to be made out of granite!”

Beyond Europe

Despite the success of his project, Von Wong hasn’t got any plans to make it a habit to crowdfund trips in the future. On his website, he dedicates a section to his series Von Wong Does Europe, where a six-minute behind-the-scenes video features his photographic journey through Europe as well as van Bommel’s reflections as a retoucher. “I love sharing the process,” says Von Wong, “because I find that it shows that anyone can do it, if they’re willing to just work for it.”
As for future endeavours, he says he will be focusing on teaching a series of workshops in Singapore and Hong Kong over a four-week period, entirely self-funded this time. And he certainly hasn’t ruled out further photography projects in the very near future. “Nikon sent me an AW-1 underwater camera to review, so I might be putting that into use in Malaysia and Indonesia,” he says. He hasn’t got any firm concept of what he might be shooting, true to his philosophy of enjoying life by the moment, and finding out what new challenges arise. “I’ve focused simply on using these stories to help open up more opportunities to keep going bigger or greater things,” he says.

Contacts

Benjamin Von Wong www.vonwong.com
Chester van Bommel www.artsome.be
Suzy Johnston + Associates (Reps) www.suzyjohnston.com