3rd Place Underwater Fashion

Claudia Weber-Gebert

"Skyfall"

The Story:

Actions like jumping or falling are easy to realise underwater and I love experimental projects. So I planned to do a skyfall shooting - a fallen angel and other people to catch him while falling. I created the wings with foam foil, but this made problems as this foil has a very high buoyancy. Also the wings in the end had a wingspan of about 5 m! The first problem was to find the perfect pool for that. With the guys of the apnea team I already worked together and I knew that Niels could manage the job of the fallen angel. And fortunately we could use the pool where the weekly training takes place. Our first attempt failed, no way to dive and so for the second attempt one week later I put extra weights on the wings to force our angel Niels to dive. Still even with 18 kg of weights it was nearly impossible to dive. The wings had a lot of buoyancy and always lifted Niels up while trying to dive. And also the whole scene was drifting away from the backdrop several times. The others helped Niels, it was exhausting and stressful for all of them. Also for me it was difficult. I had to watch out where exactly they would dive and be in the perfect position to shoot what ever would be possible in this situation. Good that I had decided to do this shooting while free-diving as well. Then our last attempt starting the dive with a roll backwards was really successful and I could take at least some photos of the SKYFALL! Ok, the wings got damaged, but the results is what I wanted to have: a dramatic and epic SKYFALL photo of a fallen angel and helping folks to catch him.

Location:

Public pool in Trier - Germany.

Equipment Used:

• Olympus EM1II with 8mm ZUIKO fisheye lens in Nauticam housing
• 2 sea&sea strobes YS D3 duo
• 3 torches.

Camera Settings: