When someone hands you a BMW catalog as inspiration for their upcoming shoot, it’s a little nervewracking. Such was the case when Pocock’s marketing director, Guedo, sent me home with a few luxury car and boat catalogs to prep for an upcoming boat shoot. Expectations were high, but these beautiful boats deserved to be shown off in a special way. Pocock was in need of some high quality, well-lit images that really displayed the craftsmanship and fine materials that go in to building these racing machines.

We shot for two days – the first day, we worked to get top-down shots of the boats. This proved quite difficult due to the length of the boats (up to 60 feet). We settled on the tried and true cherry picker method; perched 30 feet up in the basket of the cherry picker, I boomed the camera precariously over the edge on a tripod while someone else drove along, stopping every few feet to grab another frame of the boat. Each frame consisted of a small section of a boat. These frames were later stitched together to create what you see at the top of this post.

Day two consisted of detail shots of the boats with different component configurations. Carbon fiber, aluminum, and more carbon fiber. We focused on getting some detailed close-ups, using high contrast lighting to emphasize the smooth lines and high end materials.

See me learning how to drive a cherry picker below: