My goal is to get people's attention. It is very difficult to get people's attention long
enough to look at an image and then understand what it means.
What we are doing here is... You'll be seeing what we're doing here soon
But this is Tim, this is Eammon and they are the best model builders in the world.
who worked on all kinds of gigantic blockbuster movies throughout the years
and we are fortunate enough to have them working on this project.
We are taking found materials. Normally these guys make stuff super realistic, and you can't tell,
they are artists at work, that build models that look authentic and real such as Titanic.
In this project I want found objects and things that we normally recognize, so we are
taking plastic bottles, this is the thing you cook turkey in at Christmas time,
tin cans, bendy straws, so I have limited the resources because I didn't want them to look
like architectural models. It is completely different from our normal shoots which are
figurative, I'm always using people in photographs but I love the still life.
The series started with the gas stations and now we have moved in to refineries.
These are some of our inspirations, our references to what these will look like in the end.
We are going to take a day to shoot each one. We shoot them at night, at dusk, in location,
so we have a lot of work to do.
We have scouted the location. I have been out there before, we know which direction
to shoot in. We are playing around with twilight which is very quick
to get that perfect balance between the sky and the LED lights.
We use thousands of them in these models.
It is pretty cool with those mountains back there.
They are even better than I imagined so it's giving us the excitement to get them all finished.
These should be connected. Those blue curves are weird. Don't you think they need to be more connected?
I would put more things facing the camera, that will be cooler.
We will move them up and turn them around to that side or something.
The goal is first of all to make stunning pictures, then play with scale,
but not only that, then you are playing with the idea that this is all garbage.
Guys, we should be that way!
When we came out at the scout, the sky was full of clouds and looked pretty amazing
but I think the sky looks better today that way.
You just never know, you work with variables but a great thing about having a still life is that
it is not someone who is going to leave, like a model or a celebrity or something.
We will do it again until it is perfect.
Let that sky get darker and let longer exposure stop it down a little bit so we have more glow.
There you go! That's cool!
Here we go, shooting. Let's go to a second.
Wow! That's dope. Ready?
There is about, literally, 5 minutes where you get the perfect balance between sky and these lights,
where the sky is glowing in really rich blue.
Well, the sky is insane right now, now we gotta go.
I like the conditional occasion where you have that finite moment and that's it.
You have a built-in time limit. Using that adrenaline to get the shoot done,
use it to our advantage.
That's beautiful!
In any of my photographs I want to express something, say something, communicate.
For me the picture is not finished until a viewer connects with it.
That's the magic of art in general, communicating something to someone else.
Of course I'm thinking like a lot of people about what's going on in the world
and the auspicious time that we live in
terms of the environment, but we're on the precipice in so many areas of
a very scary time if you're aware of what's our impact on the environment. For me it all stems
from the beginning of the industrial age and the discovery of fossil fuels.
It only happened in the last hundred years. It has been this really dramatic shift in the atmosphere
caused by humans' use of fossil fuels. What represents them for me are these gas stations.
Are they inherently evil? No. They are neither good nor bad.
We are all using it. It is giving us our quality of life.
Everything from medicine to transportation allow us as human beings to populate the planet.
That is perfect! I don't want to tell people what to think.
I want people to figure things out for themselves and I want to be clear in what I'm thinking
but I don't want to preach.
We're good. That is beautiful, Joe.
Beautiful grey and the dark navy blue to the royal blue to cyan,
and this yellow right up at the horizon and
this strong contrast black against the yellow. That really makes this beautiful palette.