Several years ago I was hired to photograph an enormous mural. The entire mural was painted in extreme photo-realism to represent the vista from Schönbrunn Palace. The artists, both classically trained, spent nearly two years incorporating images of the children of the homeowners into this mural. The murals, one on each wall of a music room, were 20 feet tall and 30 feet long.
The artists, a husband and wife team, Christian and Claire Bradford, are masters of detail. This mural was painted with Trompe L’oiel and En Grisaille.
As you might imagine, lighting a creation of this size was what you might call a herculean task. The geometry alone in lighting something of this size was even a bit of a puzzle for the pros at PPR. We rented a camera, some crystal lights, used my 10-22 wide angle lens, built scaffolding, and worked out how to raise the many hundreds of pounds chandaliers. Did I mention we had to do all of this at night since one wall of the great room is all windows? In order to control the lighting, we had to black out those windows (hooray for very large black backdrop cloths — and a few dozen black trash bags). The clients were still very much living in their home at the time as well.
This job was an amazing exercise in lighting, design, and an amazing opportunity for me to meet and work with two phenomenal artists.
