Earlier this year, in February, I shot an assignment for The Gate Worldwide, an international advertising agency, and their client State Street Global Advisors. The image produced for their ad campaign was a shot of professional golfer Camilo Villegas crouched in his “spiderman” position (see the final ad layout above). The ads started running a few months ago in several golf magazines, hence I am now able to show the image and talk about that assignment.

First off, I have to say that Camilo Villegas, Tim Ryan, Shari Goetz and the crew from The Gate were a pleasure to work with and were very professional. I was hired to shoot stills of Camilo while they were filming a national Television commercial for State Street as well. If you have ever been on set when a major commercial or Hollywood picture is being filmed then you know the drill. There were at least sixty people involved in the film crew including a big-time Hollywood director and cinematographer. This was a big budget affair and the stills were a very small component, but nevertheless, the client needed top-shelf still images and I was able to work around the film crew in the middle of the day to get my shots.

I had 45-minutes to get set up for this shot. We used three strobes and tested the set up with a stand in. I was shooting tethered to a laptop so the Art Director could see the set up shots and the images as they came in. Once we had the green light on the test shots, Camilo came out and we went to work. It was at that point that the Art Director came over and whispered into my ear, “You’ve got ten shots. That’s it.” I shot twelve and with the recycle times on the strobe it ended up being about 24 seconds total with Camilo. After looking through the shots the Art Director saw that we got what they wanted and that was it. We were done. Luckily we got the shot at midday, because only thirty minutes later the weather turned quite nasty for the rest of the afternoon. I was very happy to get the shots they needed in such a short time period because the film crew was ready to start shooting again and we didn’t want them to be waiting around. My sincere thanks to Camilo, Tim, Shari and the entire crew on this shoot. It was fascinating to see such a large motion crew at work and to be a part of it, albeit in a small manner.

Image Caption: Top-ranked professional Golfer Camilo Villegas crouching on the putting green in  his “spiderman” pose to check out the terrain at the Dove Mountain Golf Resort just outside of Tucson, Arizona.