PHOTOGRAPHING BILLBOARDS AND DOOH CAMPAIGNS - HOW HARD CAN IT BE?

OR… 48 LONG BUT AMAZING HOURS IN AMSTERDAM AND LONDON FOR CBOE

Often called the Venice of the North - a title which seems to be shared with just about every European City from Stockholm to Newcastle - Amsterdam is prettier than I expected. But with its hordes of manic cyclists, surly Uber drivers, wall-eyed pothead tourists with their attendant stink of weed, and an overall slightly weird attitude to sex , it could as easily also be called the London of mainland Europe.

Having been tasked with a 24-hour scavenger hunt for billboards to be photographed for a marketing campaign, only to find way too many weren’t where they were supposed to be, I walked 22 miles and took three million Ubers. I didn't get to see any naked women in shop windows, sample any hash cakes, or even so much as look at a beer.

I can tell you the cake is good, the hot chocolate is excellent, the people - when not hurtling around on bikes at a terrifyingly aggressive speed - seem very nice. And I didn't get more than a few minutes here and there to grab the odd snapshot, which is a shame, because it is a very, very pretty city.

More to the point- how hard is it to photograph billboards? Surely it is shooting fish in a barrel, falling off a log, etc etc.

Well I’m here to tell you it ain’t, and - if it’s of use to you - just how flexible and professional you need to be to get it right.

1. Location.  They are frequently not where the grid references say they will be, so if you don’t like hiking, this is not the job for you.  In Amsterdam I put in somehting like 20 miles across 24 hours, coming quite close to missing my return flight.  Naturally this can be a little stressful but being such a beautiful friendly city, and given the weather was lovely, I actually had a great time.

These were my first billboards, and it took me four hours to find them, and then only by accident on my cab back to the hotel. Using a tripod and slow shutter I got a nice effect with the car headlights, the darkness, and the otherwise tricky refresh rate of the billboard itself. About which, more below.

 2. Screen refresh rates.  Despite owning the most banding-free, flicker-free professional camera on the market, I still had to bring my shutter down to as low as 1/30th.  If I hadnt brought a tripod along I’d have been a bit in trouble.  Lucky I was once a boy scout and always come prepared.  (truth - I wasnt but I did)

3. Environment.  Or modifying for the background.  You would think it was such a simple photo to take.  But inevitably you need to angle your shots to get the best out of the background and be able to not only expose for what might be a much brighter environment behind the sign - especially here where the colours are quite dark. Owning professional software like Photoshop and Lightroom also helps, blending this together so it still looks real.  Relevance of location details and knowing how best to frame them is of course also important, as in the shot below that incorporates the Zuidas street sign, complementing nicely the tag line of the billboard ad “Connecting the Zuidas to Wall Street”. Being able to see clearly the subject AND the environment is crucial.

4. Reflections.  Naturally your client doesnt want to see you reflected in the billboard, but they also don’t want to see anything much else reflected there, so again, knowing how best to deal with the direction of the light, careful use of filters and post production again help. At the same time, if there were no reflections at all, you would think it was fake, right? And the whole point of a job like this is to evidence the location and effectiveness of the DOOH campaign.

5. Discretion and Permission.  Billboards are in public spaces for sure.  But it is a common misconception that all public spaces are actually public land.  Many, such as Canary Wharf are in fact private property.  Generally Canary Wharf are pretty good when it comes to photography, and my luck was in on discovering the UK billboards didnt require tripods.  However when it came to the ones located in the shopping mall complex, I was forbidden from using a “professional camera”.  Just as well my phone shoots 48mp raw and 4K video!