Outdoor Landscape Photography for Calm.com
Keep Calm + Carry On
Filming California Landscapes for the Calm App
Being based in the San Francisco Bay Area allows me the opportunity to work with a lot of great tech companies. I love working in this category because it's always progressive and creative.
One of my regular clients is the excellent meditation app calm.com. I've been able to shoot everything from product to portraiture for them - and I thought that spread was about as wide a gamut as I could ever hope for in a client. Until they reached out to me with an absolute dream job that I could have never imagined coming from the tech industry: Landscapes!
The in-app backgrounds for Calm are peaceful looping scenes of nature. I use the app and I have my favorites...or at least I had my favorites, until I was given the chance to create a series of new, exclusive landscape scenes for the entire user base to interact with.
Calm comissioned me to scout and film new background videos under the headings of, "Peaceful River" "Waterfall" "Rain on Leaves" and "Field/Meadow". All of the videos had to crop perfectly at 16:9 for AND 9:16 for mobile rotation - all from 1 shot (not an easy composition range to manage!). If that wasn't enough, the scenes also had to be shot in perfect daylight conditions, and (without the camera moving) perfect dusk light conditions for Apple iOS' night mode. And, of course, they had to loop perfectly with whatever movement was occurring in view. It was arguably a technical nightmare to execute on...but I thrive on this kind of thing - I couldn't have been happier :)
Getting a landscape angle to work in both lighting scenarios was surprisingly challenging. A whole set of criteria had to be met with regards to orientation of features, time of moon-rise, and clarity of evening skies. Camera choice was no gimme either, we ultimately settled on a RED system that could deliver the highest quality image in both peak light and near-perfect dark. Of course, this meant that I had a lot of weight to shlep around in the backcountry with me - but hell, I was going to be spending hours with a beautiful view, alone.
This assignment ended up taking me from a lavender farm in Sonoma County, California, up into the Sierra Nevada Mountains around Tahoe, CA and finally back down to my own backyard where I designed and built an outdoor "rain studio". I was challenged, sunburned, un-showered for days, and at absolute peace with myself for the entire week. It was a beautiful experience that makes me think perhaps Calm.com should start having me lead landscape workshops for their users!