P 65＋の Fiat 500との出会い

Max Power

Max Sarotto’s career is in the fast lane of photography. His first professional job was shooting for Ferrari and ten years later his stock continues to rise. He is in demand from other blue chip automotive brands - Alfa Romeo to Fiat and Iveco. His latest shoot was capturing the Fiat 500 when Phase One’s P 65+ was given a full throttle test drive.

The P 65+ is by no means Sarotto’s first experience with Phase One equipment. In fact, he was one of the earliest photographers to embrace the digital revolution with his first Apple Mac in 1997 for postproduction work. Two years later he bought a Phase One Scan Digital back. It was around Christmas of 1999 that he invested in the Company’s LightPhase model that was the first in a series of ten digital backs purchased in the ensuing decade. Sarotto has always used Mamiya cameras. He started out with the RZ67 until he swapped to a Mamiya 645 at the same time as he upgraded to a P25 back. His dedication to staying at the cutting edge of technology with the most up to date photographic now includes a photographic armoury that includes a P 45, P 65+ and another upgrade to the Phase One 645 camera.

Lights, camera, action…

Sarotto spends the majority of his time working from his base in Turin, Italy where he is based in his own studio. However, he often works in nearby hire studios because he needs their gigantic proportions, with ceiling heights of around 18 metres, when he shoots pictures of the biggest cars, trucks and tractors. As some of these outside studios are 50 metres in length they are large enough to cater for these vehicles.

Preparation for one of Sarotto’s shoots usually starts with a couple of days of shooting test shots of different angles of the car so that the designers can see how it looks in a layout. It’s after this time that he’s briefed on how many pictures are required and from what point of view. He has a team of two general assistants and two lighting assistants and he says occasionally an art director and client will join him, although he says that the last two are more likely to join him when he’s working in a pleasant setting. He shot the new Fiat 500 both in a studio and on location and always uses continuous ambient light sources such as Kino Flo Neon lamps to illuminate his subject matter. Attention to detail is vital so lighting a car correctly can use up to 50 lights. The smallest detail needs to be highlighted and he explains that several lights are employed just for the front wheel because every surface is different. He continues by saying, "a wheel can have polished aluminum, painted aluminum… the brake disc is carbon and the caliper is another colour… so you need to be able to almost ‘feel’ the materials that are used on the car".

The Phase One 645 with an attached P 65+ is mounted on a Gitzo carbon fibre tripod and Sarotto insists on using an Arca-Swiss panoramic head that he says he feels lost without. The P 65+ RAW files are shot directly into a Mac and the latest version of Capture One 4 PRO via a FireWire connection. Overall, the Fiat 500 shoot took a day to light and capture, followed by another day of work in postproduction. The final images of the car are a combination of between 7 and 15 images composed together. There are also another 3 to 5 for the ground and surrounding environment although he says a lot of the time the background is shot on another occasion. Intriguingly, he concedes that sometimes when he shoots a car it isn’t the final production version and may be much more of a prototype, so parts of it will change such as the wheels and they may have to be reshot individually and put into place using Photoshop. Sarotto does all his own postproduction so he has full control and creativity over his images. He tells us, "I know the effects that I want to attain and although an art-worker might be a master of postproduction they won’t have the same eye and sensibility as the photographer". He uses a Mac Pro Quad-Core and Capture One 4 PRO to process the images but he admits it is more complex to use than the Capture One version 3 simply because it offers so many more features. "It is better because you can save time as you don’t have to do some much in Photoshop," he enthuses. He also discovered another added benefit of the new software and that is developing the files is achieved faster than with the older software - a crucial factor to speed up workflow times especially as the P 65+ produces files up to 60 megapixels.

 

Performance and reliability

Cameras are a bit like cars – they are nothing unless they are handled well, have a powerful engine and a consistent performance, so how did he find Phase One’s latest offering? He states that because he has previously used the P 45, it was a very straightforward transition to use the P 65+ model. He says that it inherits much of its controls and firmware from its predecessor. He also finds that the handling of the Phase One 645 is just as easy because of the position of the controls and the grip. In addition, the weight and balance feel familiar to the Mamiya 645. But reliability is so often the key and he clearly asserts, "Build quality is perfect" and goes on to confirm, "in the last ten years I’ve bought ten digital backs. The products are strong, I’ve used them in -15 and 50+ degrees centigrade and I’ve never had a problem. I don’t ever remember getting a corrupted file". Image quality should be a paramount concern for any photographer but Sarotto’s need for the 60 megapixel sensor in the P 65+ is easily justified when his images are regularly featured in billboard proportions. However, Sarotto has found that his clients often re-use older images for new campaigns by cropping the original down so added the benefit of shooting with the highest resolution digital back is that his images can be recycled without noticeable image degradation – and he gets paid again!