“It is a crazy good camera in a tiny package,” professes Australian professional photographer Adam Pretty, about Panasonic’s Lumix S5 digital camera. He was approached by the company to produce a set of promotional images for this camera, and Adam decided to go with skateboarding as the choice of sport to photograph with it.

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When you’re doing a light painting project for your portfolio, you can probably afford all the time you need to get it right. That’s not to say commercial work needs to be rushed all the time, but there’s always a lot more riding on getting it right the first time when shooting for a high-priority client. When you’re given limited time with the pre-production model of a new camera, the pressure is really turned up. Adam Pretty dug into his extensive experience as a photographer to develop a set of images worthy of the S5’s product brochure.

The Essential Photo Gear Used by Adam Pretty

Adam told us:

Panasonic S5

Profoto heads

Profoto magnum reflectors

I use 35mm equipment primarily, I used to use quite a bit of medium and large format but that has dropped off in the last few years.I am using Canon for my sports editorial work and then Lumix for more projects and stories and commercial work.

The Phoblographer: Please tell us about yourself and how you got into photography.

Adam Pretty: I started at high school when I was around 15 years old, did some work experience while at school and fell in love with photography, and decided that was what I wanted to do. I started work right after high school at the Sydney Morning Herald as I deferred university for one year and then never stopped working and didn’t go back to university.

The Phoblographer: Tell us about how Panasonic approached you for this project.

Adam Pretty: I had done a few other assignments with Lumix. We were both really happy working together, and they came to me with this project which they wanted to be based around sports. Seeing as skating (skateboarding) was going to be new for Tokyo 2020, it seemed like a really good fit to go with the S5 camera as it was a more compact adventure/sport-centric camera. They just asked for a few options, and I pitched a few other sports as well, but skating was the best fit.

The Phoblographer: Was this a project under wraps for quite some time, or was it something conceptualised and produced just before the S5 launch?

Adam Pretty: Not really; it was shot as the first pre-production models were released, and the schedule was really tight. I had only one battery and body, so nothing could really go wrong, so it was pretty stressful.

The Phoblographer: Who came up with the idea for this? Were there other ideas that didn’t make the cut?

Adam Pretty: Skating was suggested by me (along with some other options), and I found a really good athlete (Tyler Edtmayer) based close to Munich and local to me, and he was the perfect fit. I was also really lucky as my son was just getting into skating, and I asked a few skate shops around Germany for recommendations and then found Tyler on his Instagram skating at the Cradle Skatepark in Brixlegg, which was also only a few hours drive away from Munich, and a perfect location.

The Phoblographer: Take us quickly through the production of the final day of this project. What was the mood you were looking to capture and how did you execute it?

Adam Pretty: I just wanted to shoot some really graphic and clean images; that was why I loved the Cradle Skatepark, there was no graffiti, and any branding around was easy to remove. I just wanted to capture some amazing images, and hopefully in a style that hadn’t been done a load of times (at least with skating). I did a few recce days down at the park and found the angles I liked and also spoke extensively to Tyler about what was possible and where he could do certain tricks. But on the day, some amazing lighting situations happen...